Апрель 2002 г. |
Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы) |
VILIUISK, Russia -- After numerous false leads and prime suspects that later proved to be innocent, scientists may have at last cornered their quarry in a half-century-long hunt for the cause of a fatal neurological disorder in eastern Russia called Viliuisk encephalomyelitis. This obscure malady, known locally as bokhoror, or "the stiffness", is one of medical science's most enduring puzzles. With the disease spreading, unmasking the villain is more urgent than ever.
© Copyright 2002 by the American Association for the Advincement of Science.
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MOSCOW, Russia, Apr 15, 2002 (RosBusinessConsulting via COMTEX) -- Three international forums are opening in Hanover on April 15: the German-Russian and German-Chinese energy congresses along with a meeting of scientists and specialists from many countries dedicated to "decentralized energy sources". The importance that the German businessmen attach to these actions is reflected by the fact that the forum is expected to have 250 top managers as its guests, according to the Eastern Committee of German Economy. The Russian delegation is represented by high-ranking business and political officials: among those to report at the forum are Russian Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko, Energy Minister Igor Yusupov, RAO UES CEO Anatoly Chubais and head of LUK oil Vagit Alekperov. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin, who set the tone of the forum during his visit to Weimar, when he raised a question of Russia's extended energy supplies to Europe and the removal of all limitations of diversification (no supplier is allowed to control more than a third of the European Union countries' energy balances). According to German comments, the Russian economy is dynamically developing amid political stability, and the growth rates, as it is stated in the latest report of the Eastern Committee, are "above average": "Russia was among the few countries who over the past years managed to achieve GDP growth of 5.7 per cent. Russia's bilateral product turnover
rose 16.8 per cent in 2001 to a record high EUR24.8 billion". The Russian energy carrier supplies account for the bulk of this turnover: they make up to 37 per cent of German gas consumption and 26.5 per cent of German oil consumption, and the importance of these supplies and their share in total turnover is expected to grow in the future. However, according to the leading German experts, the times have long passed when Russia could benefit from the "natural exchange" of its raw materials for strong foreign currency.
Russia's long experience enables a transit to joint projects of agriculture update and energy saving, environmental protection, the creation of renewable energy sources in Russia. The Hanover forum will open with the report of Ruhrgas CEO, Deputy Chairman of the Eastern Committee of German Economy Burkhardt Bergman, the Vremya Novostey newspaper reported.
© Copyright 2002, RosBusinessConsulting. All Rights Reserved
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На форуме в Москве, который начнет работу в мае 2002 года будут обсуждаться проблемы энергетики. В нем примут участие ученые из США, Канады, России и Японии
MOSCOW, Russia, Apr 24, 2002 (RosBusinessConsulting via COMTEX) -- The US - Russian summit, which is to be held in May, 2002, will be devoted to the cooperation of the two countries in the energy sector. "Russia is interested in the development of cooperation with the USA not only on two-party projects but in the global energy strategy", Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov declared the other day. Energy problems will be discussed in Moscow this week by scientist from the US, Canada, Russia and Japan. They are to decide if it is expedient to start creating a thermonuclear reactor. Such a reactor does not use uranium, which resources are limited on our planet. It uses hydrogen to generate energy.
Russian Research Center Kurchatov Institute and the US Sundear institute are preparing a special report for the governments of the two countries. According to the Director of the Kurchatov Institute, this report will help the governments to understand all problems in the energy sector and to develop the nuclear energy sector in cooperation. Russia and the USA, as the two leading nuclear powers, should be in charge of these problems, the director believes. In fact the USA controls some 80 percent of the total volume of nuclear fuel in the world. The Kurchatov Institute suggests that fast neutrons reactors and technologies with the so-called closed cycle should be used at nuclear power stations. It will enable a reactor to use practically the whole volume of uranium and not just 5 percent of it, as is used at present. So a reactor's capacity will grow by 20 times, the Vremya Novostey newspaper reported.
© Copyright 2002, RosBusinessConsulting. All Rights Reserved
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MOSCOW, Apr 18, 2002 (The Christian Science Monitor via COMTEX) -- Russia is facing a demographic crisis so dire that its population could shrink by half within 50 years. The only obvious solution - to encourage youthful immigrants from overpopulated Asian neighbors such as China - is so politically sensitive that Russian leaders refuse to even discuss it.
Russia's challenge is a double whammy. Like most of the developed world, birthrates have fallen far below levels that would sustain the population. At the same time, Russian death rates, particularly among working-age males, have skyrocketed due to post-Soviet poverty, substance abuse, disease, stress and other ills.
Russia's population has fallen from 149 million a decade ago to just over 144 million today. Male life expectancy now stands at 59 years, with the average Russian woman living 72 years.
Demographic experts say that the country is losing one million of its population annually, and the nosedive is accelerating.
"Whole regions of Siberia and the Russian far east are already depopulated, and new deserts are appearing even in former 'black earth' regions of central Russia", says Lev Gudkov, a demographer with the independent Russian Center for Public Opinion Research. "We will not be able to maintain our industry, agriculture or our armed forces."
Since the USSR's collapse, mortality rates among young males have risen to levels never before seen in peacetime. Mr. Gudkov predicts that there could be one pensioner for every worker in Russia within 20 years. "Not even a rich economy could survive that kind of strain", he says.
Russian women, who tend to be as well-educated and career-oriented as their Western counterparts, have been been having fewer children since the 1970s. Births now stand at 1.1 per woman, far short of the 2.4 babies each that would be needed to stabilize the population.
Russian nationalists have widely blamed the demographic crisis on women, and their proposed solutions boil down to removing them from the labor market and sending them home to have more children.
Most Western countries compensate for lower birthrates by permitting temporary and permanent forms of immigration, which provide both skilled and unskilled workers to keep economies growing and tax revenues flush.
But even after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia has resisted that solution.
"The only acceptable sources of immigrants for us are the Russian-speaking populations of former Soviet countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States", says Yevgeny Krasinyev, head of migration studies at the official Institute of Social and Economic Population Studies in Moscow.
The severity of Russia's population decline has been masked by an influx of mainly ethnic Russian immigrants from the former Soviet states of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Baltics, but the flow from the CIS is slowing to a trickle. Alexander Belyakov, a pro-Kremlin parliamentarian and head of the Duma's Resources Committee, says: "We will encourage people to come from CIS countries, but Russia does not need any other immigrants."
Experts say that Russia not only has no immigration strategy, it has no effective laws to govern the issue at all. "There are only prohibitions", says Viktor Voronkov, director of the St. Petersburg Center for Independent Social Research. "This guarantees that
most immigration remains illegal, a boon to only the black market and the criminalized part of society." Tens of thousands of migrant construction workers, from Ukraine, Moldova, and other CIS countries fuel a growing housing boom on Moscow's outskirts, yet few have legal status in Russia or pay any taxes.
Mr. Vorontkov says the main obstacle to rational immigration guidelines is a deep fear of being overwhelmed by outsiders. "Xenophobia remains very strong, not only in the Russian street but at the highest levels of officialdom as well", he says. Most feared of all is China, sparsely populated Siberia's teeming neighbor. Experts say there are already as many as 200,000 Chinese living and working in Russia, mostly in trade and small manufacture.
Even among the most open-minded Russian experts, the idea of inviting Chinese workers to till Siberia's abandoned farmlands or lend their entrepreneurial skills to Russia's depressed cities seems dangerous. "The situation on the Chinese border is already out-of-control due to illegal immigration. Russia needs to protect itself", says Mr. Krasinyev. "Letting Chinese workers come in large numbers looks like a solution, but is it really?" says Vladimir Iontsev, a Moscow professor of demography. "You have to ask yourself, would Russia still be Russia?"
© (c) Copyright 2002. The Christian Science Monitor
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YANRAKYNNOT, Russia - The stalwart Russian Arctic people have survived for many centuries alongside polar bears, seals and whales in conditions too harsh for other human settlement.
Their hold on the land is so tenuous and so subject to disruption from the outside that anthropologists have predicted their demise for two centuries.
Until now, the Inuit have defied the doomsayers. Nature has always provided. But now nature itself has gone away.
Archeological evidence is scant, but it suggests that today's Siberian Inuit arrived in Chukotka from central Asia about 2,500 years ago.
That settlement would not have been possible without the massive global warming that took place more than 10,000 years ago at the end of the last great Ice Age.
Melting ice submerged the Bering land bridge that the first Americans are believed to have walked across some 13,000 years earlier.
The waters that surround the Chukotka Peninsula today are among the richest in the world.
They teem with 25 species of marine mammals; 450 species of fish, mollusks and crustaceans; vast numbers of summering seabirds; and innumerable krill and plankton that provide food for many whales.
The early Inuit followed their prey. They lived in underground houses insulated from the cold and moved among seasonal hunting camps.
They collected eggs from seabirds and salmon and plucked greens, berries and mushrooms from the tundra. They hunted walrus, seal and whale.
The flesh of marine mammals, particularly "maktak", the blubbery skin of the whale, is still preferred by many to "European" macaroni and canned fruit.
Ludmilla Ainana, a 66-year-old Inuit, was educated by the Soviets in Saint Petersburg and now lives in an apartment in Chukotka's biggest town, Providenya.
Though she can now buy chicken and noodles and exotic ingredients like soy sauce at a grocery store, she still prefers the food of a childhood spent at a coastal camp in a single "yaranga", or reindeer hide tent.
"Walrus flippers with sea cabbage", she said. "It's delicious food."
When American whalers began arriving in the 1840s, they praised the natives for their ingenuity and hired the men to kill whales.
The whalers left behind a taste for imported trade goods, decimated whale stocks and a native population ravaged by measles, smallpox and flu.
At the time, anthropologists warned that the native way of life was doomed.
But the Inuit took to the whalers' improved harpoons and became even better hunters. Still, the hunger for manufactured goods marked the beginning of a long, slow shift from the old ways.
In the 1920s, the Soviets accelerated the process, introducing the Inuit hunters and Chukchi herders to jobs, wages and a steady diet of imported food. They provided houses, schools, clinics and coal for heat.
Families like Ainana's that had lived in scattered settlements were relocated by the hundreds into villages such as Yanrakynnot.
A village that once numbered 26 inhabitants in five households would swell to nearly 500, even though the land could not support so many.
"These were convenient for supply ships", Ainana said, "but the hunting was very poor."
For the Inuit, food, livelihood and an animistic religion had always been intertwined. They not only hunted the whale, they worshipped it.
But the Soviets jailed the shamans and outlawed native whaling. Instead, big Russian whaling ships caught the beasts and towed them to shore.
The job of the natives was to slice up the carcasses and feed the meat to caged foxes being raised for their fur on the outskirts of Yanrakynnot.
There were no more ceremonies, no chanting by the elders, no heroes returning from the hunt.
"People stopped hunting and they became butchers", said Igor Krupnik, a Smithsonian Institution ethnologist and expert on the native people of Chukotka.
"This was a tremendous blow to their culture and their self-esteem."
The young people began to embrace Soviet imports, including vodka and cigarettes. Many began marrying ethnic Russians. Their children received Russian lessons and Russian names.
That modernization came to an abrupt end along with the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost overnight, there were no supply ships, no food, no coal, no heat.
In some parts of the Russian Arctic, life expectancy dropped to about 37 years. A 1989 census found 1,400 Inuit in Chukotka.
The population is now estimated to be 700. Yanrakynnot's population in 1989 was 448; today it has 100 fewer residents.
Those who remained tried to resurrect subsistence hunting, even though no one really knew how.
Igor Macotrik, a hunter, filled two small boats with young men and bravely headed out to chase 50,000-pound whales.
There were accidents and deaths. Some were the fault of storms and rough seas; others were caused by inexperience.
"Unfortunately, the old generation passed away, the ones that knew how to approach the whale, how to use the darting gun", Macotrik said. "We started from zero."
With the help of Alaskan cousins who provided boats, gear and even hunting lessons, the Russian Inuit once again surprised the doomsayers.
"We watched with amazement as these people restored their whaling", Krupnik said.
"We were wrong to say the Soviet Union had dealt them a mortal blow."
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Contra Costa Times
/ Apr. 14, 2002
Arctic Natives Watch their Way of Life Melt away
A warm wind erodes the animal populations in the land of ice
- By Usha Lee McFarling, Los Angeles Times
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YANRAKYNNOT, Russia -- The native elders have no explanation, and scientists are perplexed as well. The icy realm of the Inuit, the tundra and ice of Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland, has started to thaw.
Strange portents are everywhere.
Thunder and lightning, once rare, have become commonplace. An eerie warm wind now blows in from the south. Hunters who prided themselves on their ability to read the sky say they no longer can predict the sudden blizzards.
"The earth", one hunter concluded, "is turning faster."
In recent years, seabirds have washed up dead by the thousands and deformed seal pups have become a common sight.
Whales appear sick and undernourished. The walrus, a mainstay of the local diet, is becoming scarce, as are tundra rabbits.
The elders, who keep thousands of years of history and legend without writing it down, have long told children this story: If the ice that freezes thick over the sea each winter breaks up before summer, the entire village could perish.
The children always laugh. In the Russian Arctic, the ground is frozen nearly year-round.
The ice blanketing the winter seas around the Bering Strait is thick enough to support men dragging sleds loaded with whale carcasses.
Even Zoya Telpina, the schoolteacher in this outpost of 350 Chukchi reindeer herders and marine mammal hunters, said that a winter sea without ice seemed like "a fairy tale."
But last winter, when Telpina looked from her kitchen window toward the Bering Sea, she saw something she had never seen in her 38 years:
The dark swell of the open ocean. Water where there had always been ice.
Telpina's husband, Mikhail, a 38-year-old dog-sled musher, has seen mushrooms on the tundra shrivel and whole herds of reindeer starve.
He has cut open the bellies of salmon to find strange insects inside. He has seen willows rise where he has never seen trees before.
The changes are so widespread that they have spawned changes in the Inuit languages that so precisely describe ice and snow.
In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as "misullijuq" - rainy snow - and are less likely to use words such as "umughagek" - ice that is safe to walk on.
In the Canadian territory of Nunavut, the Inuit people say the weather is "uggianaqtuq" - like a familiar friend acting strangely.
What the residents of the Arctic are reporting fits convincingly with powerful computer models, satellite images and recently declassified ice measurements taken by Russian submarines.
In the past century, parts of the Arctic have warmed by 10 degrees Fahrenheit, 10 times the global average.
Sea ice covers 15 percent less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago, and that ice has thinned from an average of 10 feet to less than 6.
A group of scientists who spent a year aboard an icebreaker, a vessel designed to cut through heavy ice, concluded that the year-round sea ice that sustains marine mammals and those who hunt them could vanish altogether in 50 years.
The U.S. Navy, already planning for an ice-free Arctic, is exploring ways to defend the previously ice-clogged Northwest Passage from attack by sea.
Lacking the stabilizing effect of great land masses, the earth's watery north is extremely sensitive to warming.
A few degrees of warmth can mean the difference between ice and water, permafrost or mud, hunger or even starvation for the inhabitants of these remote lands.
Yet, explaining the quick thaw and determining its cause, whether human or natural, has so far eluded the experts.
There are few long-term climate observations from the Arctic. Weather stations in the Far North are just 50 years old. And there is almost no data from places like Russia's Chukotka Peninsula, only 55 miles from Alaska.
In their search for information, Western scientists are turning to sources they once disparaged.
In a rare convergence of science and folklore, a group of scientists is mining the memories of native elders, counting animal pelts collected by hunters and documenting the collective knowledge of entire villages.
These threads, which stretch back generations, may be the only way to trace the outlines of the half-century of change that has resculpted the Arctic and to figure out its cause.
"We have all these people paying very close attention to the animals they hunt and the sea ice they travel on", said Henry Huntington, a scientific consultant in Alaska.
"It's often extremely accurate and far better than anything science has come up with."
Native observations that at first don't seem consistent with the warming, such as snowier winters and colder summers, fit the scientists' models.
Warmer air is expected to usher more storms and precipitation into the Arctic. Melting sea ice in summer can lower the water temperature and lead to cooler temperatures on adjacent land.
Despite parallel observations, Western researchers and Arctic dwellers still look at each other suspiciously across a cultural divide.
Many scientists remain uncomfortable with any information that is not backed by numbers and measurements.
Many natives resent scientists who come ashore with their machines, thinking they know more about the place than those who live there.
Others mistrust Western scientists who come to gather data and never send back word of their findings.
They still recall a group of toxicologists who came to remote villages here several years ago to collect women's breast milk to measure pollution levels.
The scientists detected organic pollutants such as dioxin and PCBs in the breast milk. But the women say they were never contacted about the results.
For scientists, the facts are mostly a matter of academic, and sometimes political, interest. For the natives, they may be a matter of life and death.
The subsistence hunters of Chukotka live in small villages without pickup trucks or snowmobiles, without supply ships or supermarkets.
They have 19th-century harpoons, small boats and limited fuel for their hunts.
These villagers, almost entirely dependent on the icy sea for their food, may be witnessing the demise of their ancient way of life.
Caleb Pungowiyi, an Inuit who works with scientists to record the observations of his elders and peers, put it this way: "When this earth starts to be destroyed, we feel it."
Ice is a second home for Gennady Inankeuyas, a 42-year-old hunter considered the best harpooner on the Chukotka Peninsula.
For years, Inankeuyas has prowled the ice for seals and walrus, dragging heavy sleds and animal carcasses over the frozen ocean.
This year, Inankeuyas returned to the uncertain ice. He had to.
"Of course it's dangerous", he said. "But the village needs the food."
That food is not as easy to come by now that the weather has changed.
"The south wind is a bad wind. It moves the walrus to another place", said a 42-year-old Inuit hunter named Igor Macotrik. "The walrus is hard to find."
Scientists understand such observations. Their data show that the walrus are declining, possibly because they have to work harder to find food.
Walrus mothers nurse their babies on sea-ice floes. Far from the coast, the mothers must dive longer and deeper from the ice to the sea floor to find clams.
In recent years, the Inuit hunters have noticed that gray whales have become extremely skinny.
The meat of some freshly killed whales smells rancid, "like medicine", said 28-year-old hunter Maxim Agnagisyak. The sled dogs won't eat it.
Scientists are beginning to analyze samples of whale blubber from the region to seek an explanation.
For several years, record numbers of gray whales have washed up dead and emaciated as they migrate to their winter calving grounds in Baja California.
Land animals are under stress as well. Reindeer herds plummeted after the Soviet Union collapsed and the government subsidies that helped sustain the herds were cut off.
The animals began starving, and their numbers continue to decline .
Scientists have not studied the reindeer herds of Chukotka, but they have seen similar starvation in Canadian caribou.
The grazing animals normally survive the winter by nosing through soft, dry snow to feed on the tundra vegetation insulated below.
In recent warm years, winter rains have alternated with snow, leaving an icy crust that is difficult to penetrate and cuts the animals' legs.
Scientists are only beginning to catch up with native observations on many other aspects of the Arctic environment, such as tundra vegetation.
They are monitoring a tree line that is advancing north as the Arctic warms.
Scientists from Russia, Delaware and Ohio have just started a large-scale project to study the permafrost as it thaws.
It is unclear if the changing climate will let them finish their work.
With scientists still debating the trajectory of change in the Arctic, the fate of the Siberian Inuit remains as uncertain as the Arctic ice in late spring.
Hunters with tiny boats and little fuel must now go much farther out to sea for food. Sometimes they return empty-handed.
Sometimes they return with prey unusual for the season, or fish native to warmer waters. Sometimes, when the seas are rough, they do not return at all.
The hunters willingly talk about the many changes they see around them. But they don't spend much time worrying about climate change.
For the moment, they have more pressing concerns: gathering enough ammo for the spring hunt and stretching their limited supply of stored whale meat.
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В июне 2002 года во Владивостоке и Находке открывается Международная конференция по проблемам развития Транссиба
KHABAROVSK, Russia, Apr 26, 2002 (RosBusinessConsulting via COMTEX) -- An international conference on the further development of container traffic at the Transsiberian railroad will take place in Vladivostok and Nakhodka on June 3-5, the press service of the Far Eastern Railroads reported today. The conference will be jointly held by the Far East Railroads and the UN Economic and Social Mission to the Asian and Pacific countries. Representatives of the Russian Railroad Ministry, sea transportation companies, shipment companies and scientists will participate in this conference.
According to the forecasts of experts of the Railroad and the Transport Ministries, over the next 2-3 years the Transsiberian railroad and Far Eastern seaports will be able to double the transportation volume of transit cargos from the USA, Japan, South Korea and China to Europe up to 100,000 containers per year. The transit distance through Russia will be twice as short as by sea, and transportation of a container will cost $400 less, experts point out.
© Copyright 2002, RosBusinessConsulting. All Rights Reserved
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Индийские и российские ученые в области противовоздушной обороны успешно провели испытания сверхзвуковой крылатой ракеты с радиусом действия 300 километров
NEW DELHI, Apr 28, 2002 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Indian and Russian defense scientists today successfully flight-tested a supersonic cruise missile with a range of around 300 km from a range in east India.
Brahmos, which operates on a fire-and-forget principle, was launched on a clear weather at 11:05 a.m. from No.3 launch complex of the interim test range (ITR) in Balasore, Orissa state, according to the Press Trust of India.
The eight-meter-long Brahmos was launched vertically from a container which can be carried on a ship or submarine or, with some modifications, an aircraft, officials said.
Launched from a ship, the missile can fly up to a height of 14 km at 2 mach (twice the speed of sound). The missile carries a 200 kg conventional war-head.
It is charged with solid propellant and has a pre-set trajectory. But a sensor on its head detects the target and can change course to strike 20 km from the targeted range (bull's eye). Brahmos can also fly at near surface level, but that shortens its range to 120 km (from a maximum of 290 km), officials said. Brahmos, having a diameter of 670 mm and weighing three tons, is a product of an Indo- Russian joint venture known by the same name.
The company was set up following an inter-governmental agreement signed in February 1998 between the two countries to design, develop, produce and market a supersonic cruise missile jointly.
The two institutions that formed the backbone of the company are Defense Research and Development Organization of India and Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building, Moscow (NPO-M).
The last flight-test of the missile was on June 12, 2001 from the ITR.
© Copyright 2002, Xinhua News Agency, all rights reserved
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STAR CITY, Russia (April 8, 2002 1:20 p.m. EDT) -- A South African businessman who wants to be the second space tourist is ready for takeoff, Russian space officials said Monday, and the Internet magnate exuded excitement about his plans for genetic experiments in space.
Mark Shuttleworth is paying $20 million for the trip this month - the same sum American Dennis Tito paid Russian space agencies last year to fly to the international station, becoming the world's first space tourist.
"I'm very proud to carry the flag of South Africa, an African country, into space for the first time", Shuttleworth told reporters at the cosmonaut training center in Star City outside Moscow.
Shuttleworth and fellow crew members Italian Roberto Vettori and Russian Yuri Gidzenko have been approved for the flight to the space station, space officials said.
Takeoff has been set for April 25, cosmonaut training center spokesman Andrei Maiboroda said. The crew is to leave Saturday for the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to prepare.
The Interfax news agency said an interdepartmental commission that must approve all those who fly on Russian rockets found Shuttleworth had not met "certain conditions" for the flight but that he had plenty of time to do so. The report did not elaborate, and officials in the commission could not be reached for comment Monday evening.
A 28-year-old economist who made a fortune with an Internet business, Shuttleworth said he would conduct gene engineering studies on the space station, using animal stem cells. He said he hoped his research could be used to help find cures for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
He said he and cosmonaut Gidzenko had been trained by Russian and South African biologists to conduct the experiments.
Shuttleworth confirmed that he is paying $20 million for the trip - but in installments that will be complete only when the mission is over.
"We have a staggered series of payments covering the training, covering the preparation, covering the launch, covering the completion - a successful completion of what we all hope will be a very good scientific program of flight", Shuttleworth said.
© Copyright (c) 2002 AP Online
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