MOSCOW // A rocket carrying the Olympic flame successfully blasted off Thursday from earth ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Games.
Nasa Live TV showed the rocket, emblazoned with the pale blue Sochi 2014 logo, launching from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome on a clear morning in Kazakhstan.
The torch will make its way to the International Space Station before being taken into space itself — making it the Olympic flame’s first spacewalk in history.
Russia's Mikhail Tyurin, Nasa's Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata of Japan beamed at the crowd as they carried the lit torch aboard the Soyuz rocket.
For safety reasons, the torch will not burn when it’s on-board the space outpost. Lighting it would consume precious oxygen and pose a threat to the crew. The crew will carry the unlit torch around the station’s numerous modules before taking it out on a spacewalk.
The Olympic torch has flown into space once before — in 1996 aboard the US space shuttle Atlantis for the Atlanta Summer Olympics — but will be taken outside the spacecraft for the first time in history.
“It’s a great pleasure and responsibility getting to work with this symbol of peace,” Tyurin told journalists on Wednesday ahead of the launch.
The torch will remain in space for five days. Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazanskiy, who are currently manning the International Space Station, will take the flame for a spacewalk on Saturday, before it is returned to earth by three astronauts on Monday.
The four-month Sochi torch relay, which started in Moscow on October 7, is the longest in the history of the Olympics. For most of the 65,000km route, the flame will travel by plane, train, car and even reindeer sleigh, but 14,000 torch bearers are taking part in the relay that stops at more than 130 cities and towns.
Last month, the Olympic flame travelled to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. Later this month it will sink to the bottom of the world’s deepest lake, Lake Baikal, and in February it will reach the peak of Mount Elbrus, at 5,642 metres the highest mountain in Russia and Europe.
The torch will be used to light the Olympic flame at Sochi’s stadium on February 7, marking the start of the 2014 Winter Games that run until February 23.
How to help
Send “thenational” to the following numbers or call the hotline on: 0502955999
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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