Touchdown!

So the ten-day exploit for the first Malaysian in space has finally come to an end, with the return of the Soyuz spacecraft this evening. Well I caught the whole descent blow-by-blow on ASTRO; the descent was uneventful apart from an error in calculation of the descent trajectory which resulted in a steeper and faster descent that expected. The important thing was that the two cosmonauts and our spaceflight participant is safely back on Earth.

What did he actually do up there on the International Space Station? From what I can gather, just a few scientific experiments. Nothing certainly of extreme scientific importance. I guess this is more of a publicity ploy for BN and the country more than anything else. Well, I guess we have to be first at something...and definitely better than dropping a car over the Earth's poles! And of course to stroke the egos of the our leaders out there, we can boast that we are the first have sent a person into space from Southeast Asia at least (and more importantly earlier than Singapore!).

So where to now from here? Well, I certainly hope the whole trip was worth it - apart from its ego-boosting purpose - because a lot of tax-payers' money went into the programme. When will we hear about the scientific experiments conducted aboard the ISS? Never, probably...as we Malaysians have very short memories and would have moved on to more bread-and-butter issues back home.

And there certainly are more earthly issues to deal with here...