Did Iran Just Rocket Creatures Into Space? Sure Seems So | Hacker News Reader

Did Iran Just Rocket Creatures Into Space? Sure Seems So

fastcompany.com

18 pointsalexandros19 comments

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Guess Denmark won't be the third spacefaring nation then.

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

I guess the Chinese aren't people? Or maybe you're counting from index 0?

Or he was excluding the US. since everyone knows by now that their space program was done in a hollywood basement.

I can understand the use of a rat and worms as they're traditional experimental models but why use turtles?

GEB.

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/11/recursive_gen...

Gamera, FTW:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamera

It was a turtle AND a rat. Must be Donatello and Master Splinter

It's inexplicable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B-K4NGo2HE&NR=1

Could this be a disguised ICBM test?

As the article points out, it's not even disguised -- a space-capable rocket is an ICBM, if you swap out the payload.

But I thought the United States and Russia spent billions of dollars on their space programs for the Tang and cutting-edge science!

What does it say on the side of the rocket (besides probably the name)?

Mahvaareh Bar Simorgh ~= Satellite bearing Phoenix.

ماهواره بر سیمرغ

To echo the sibling post, "Satellite-Bearing Phoenix" is an acceptable translation.

Literally, it is "Satellite upon Phoenix", where Simorgh is a Persian mythical bird roughly equivalent to a phoenix of western literature (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurgh).

Is Farsi difficult to learn?

Its an Indo-European language, so if your native language is Indo-European, then you will encounter many familiar structures and words. (There are quite a few Persian loan words in English, btw.)

The script will likely present the greatest challenge. It is Arabic but nevertheless it is an alphabet. Beyond the letter forms, you will need to adjust to the idea of positional capitalization and joins.

Farsi/Persian also has a fairly complete coverage of various sounds, some of which may present a problem to the non-native speaker.

Finally, Iranians do have a fairly distinct partition between formal (written/official) language and the everyday conversational usage. The conversational style is much more fluid.

Although I don't know Farsi one of the instructors at my college said it was one of the easiest languages to learn. She said many of her students were writing Farsi poetry by the end of the semester.

No, this is not a correct translation. The correct one is "Phoenix Satellite Launch Vehicle" or "Phoenix Satellite Carrier". It's just a mockup at this point.

This was just a sounding rocket, nothing more. No ICBM test, nothing like that. Third in a series of simple sounding rockets to test telemetry and command. First launch of such a rocket since Iran put a small satellite into LEO last year.

There's very little practical difference between a space rocket program and an ICBM program. Fore example, during the Cold War, the Japanese Space Agency's most advanced rocket was basically a direct copy of the United States' MX missile.

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