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The stunt earlier this month by the founder of Cirque du Soleil, who once performed as a fire breather, was intended to provide a moment of levity for his wife and children during a video linkup. But it also served a more serious purpose: to draw attention to the crusade for which he paid $35 million to journey into orbit ¨C the pearl jewelry need for clean water on Earth.

Mr. Lalibert¨¦ is the seventh space tourist to be sent aloft on Russian rockets. His odyssey, now over, shows how much the Russian space program has evolved since the pioneering days of Sputnik a half century ago, when the country’s technological prowess was both the envy ¨C and vexation ¨C of the West.

Though hardly the juggernaut it was at the height of the cold war, the Russian space program today is also not just a cosmic limousine for wealthy clowns. In recent years, it has become something of a taxicab for spacefaring nations around the world.

Earlier this month, no fewer than three Soyuz spacecraft were docked at the International Space Station (ISS). During the recent grounding of US space shuttles, both Soyuz and Progress missions were essential to keeping the ISS going. At the same time, the Russians remain active in the satellite launch business. “This year we will have 44 flights, which is more than we had last year, and we spend less per flight than the Americans do,” says Alexander Voro-byov, press secretary of RosKosmos, showing a touch of the old Russian pride.

The Russians are keeping a hand in unmanned space exploration as well. Future plans include Luna-Glob, a much-delayed lunar probe that is now slated to go up in 2012. Phobos-Grunt, a return probe to gather rock and soil samples from the biwa pearl Martian moon Phobos, now scheduled for 2011 (it had been slated to take off this month). And there is the proposed Venera-D probe to map Venus, slated for 2016.

Rising budgets have undergirded this activity. Starting in 2005, the government increased outlays to RosKosmos as the economy stabilized and oil revenues increased during the Putin years. For 2009, the budget is still at that higher level of around $2.5 billion, though no one is sure this can be maintained if the economic crisis continues.

“The situation in our national space industry is extremely difficult, but we hope for better times,” says Igor Lisov, a columnist with Novosti Kosmonavtiki, a leading Russian journal of space science. “We manage to sell some flights [space tourism], but this really doesn’t bring in much income. We’ve begun making a good business lofting communications satellites, and our own work goes on.”

It is true that the Russian program remains a hologram of what it once was. During Soviet times, the space program was funded on par with NASA. With the fall of the USSR, the rubles dried up. The 1990s, in fact, were marked by many humiliations. For example, one copy of the Buran space shuttle, the Soviet Union’s answer to the akoya pearl US space shuttle, ended up as a children’s attraction in Moscow’s Gorky Park, where it still sits beside the Moscow River, gathering fungus and looking forlorn.

The Mir space station, one of the most successful and long-lived (15 years) Soviet-era projects, had to be supported by private contributions, and there was talk of selling it off, perhaps to be an orbiting TV studio. In 2001, it was finally brought down and dumped into the South Pacific. It was this period that saw RosKosmos turn to moneymaking schemes such as satellite launches and space tourism.

“Much has been lost to us already, after many years of catastrophic neglect, and a lot will have to be rebuilt from the ground up,” says Mr. Lisov. “Our space industry still relies on the old personnel, and it does not offer the kind of salaries that would attract talented young people. That will need to change if the space program is to have a future.”

Still, RosKosmos retains a lot of Soviet-era space assets, such as Baikonur (which is in Kazakhstan) and other space launch centers. Star City, near Moscow, is a very impressive complex for training cosmonauts and controlling missions. Talk remains active here about a successor to the ISS, new generations of Russian rockets ¨C the new Angara family, supposedly coming soon ¨C and even a manned mission to Mars. But no one thinks 20th century-style space achievements will be possible without a whole new level of international cooperation.

Boston – Ed Weiler was ready for a break. So the top scientist at NASA looked for his friend David Southwood of the European Space Agency (ESA) to join him in a respite from the second day of talks at a meeting about Mars probes, orbital spacecraft, and plucky planetary rovers. It was July in Annapolis, Md. Hot. Sultry. The two men sat on a terrace overlooking the salt-scented seaside town.

Over a Diet Pepsi and coffee, Drs. Weiler and Southwood chatted amiably about their ultimate passion ¨C and one of the holy grails of planetary science: bringing back a rock sample from Mars. But the conversation inevitably got bogged down in the hard reality of arithmetic. Both knew it would take at least $1 billion just to land a spacecraft on the Red Planet.

Then the two men had a eureka moment: Why not have NASA and ESA team up on a venture? Not just one agency putting an instrument on another’s spacecraft. An entire set of missions ¨C jointly.

As Weiler put it: “Maybe we ought to pearl jewelry be conceiving these things upfront, together.”

The result: An announcement this past July of a pioneering agreement between the two agencies to develop a joint Mars exploration program. The effort would begin with missions in 2016 and 2018. It would reach its apex in the 2020s with the first return in the history of the human species of soil and rock samples from another planet.

The venture hatched over talk of money and Martian geology may now become a template for international cooperation in space over the next generation. As exploration of the heavens becomes increasingly expensive, many experts around the world think we have reached a hinge moment in history when joint ventures are the best ¨C and perhaps only ¨C way to undertake distant exploration, both manned and unmanned, of the cosmos.

And why not? The world science community has already come together to smash atoms beneath pastureland on the Swiss-French border. It has joined hands to probe distant galaxies with a china cabinet of radio-telescope dishes on a desert expanse in Chile. It is collaborating on an experimental nuclear-fusion reactor that could herald the way to producing unlimited energy. Why not send vessels together to biwa pearl Mars or Titan or Europa?

To a certain extent, of course, we already do. The International Space Station, by name and definition, is a collaborative project. The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn is a cooperative venture of NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, and the United States had a key instrument on the probe India recently ferried to the moon.

But these tend to be lone projects ¨C a lunar water sensor supplied here, a joint satellite launch there. Some now believe it’s time for true collaboration ¨C missions jointly conceived, jointly funded, and jointly carried out ¨C to push mankind to the next threshold of space exploration and to forge a new spirit of cooperation among nations. In other words, a sort of Star Trek Starfleet Command. They see it as the only way mankind can continue the quest, innate since the days of the caveman, to akoya pearl find out “what’s over the next horizon.”

Yet before the world embarks on any kind of cosmic Kumbaya ride, a fundamental question looms: Can spacefaring nations really overcome the impediments that have traditionally inhibited such ventures ¨C national pride, suspicion of sharing technology, bureaucratic and cultural differences?

“We have to do it or we won’t be doing the grand mission of exploration,” says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a space-exploration advocacy group in Pasadena, Calif.

ONE THING IS CERTAIN: Spaceflight isn’t cheap, whether you’re launching cameras or cosmonauts. The Augustine committee, appointed to study options for the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program, reiterated this point in its report to the White House. Part of the challenge: The questions driving scientists to explore outer space grow more complicated with each mission. As a result, so does the hardware they send skyward.

Abdullah Abdullah, the challenger to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suggested Sunday that he might not participate in the runoff election scheduled for Nov. 7.

Mr. Karzai must meet a list of demands in order to avoid the widespread fraud that marred the Aug. 20 presidential election, Dr. Abdullah said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.

Without these assurances of a fair election, Abdullah said he “was not going to take the country through this saga again.”

Echoing the sentiments he made to The Monitor Friday, he noted that “people lost their lives” in violence that erupted during in the first election: “I don’t want this opportunity to turn into another waste.”

The comments are undoubtedly ¨C at least in part ¨C overseas electioneering, Afghan style. Abdullah is playing upon Washington’s doubts about corruption in Karzai’s government in hopes of finding an ally. He has said Karzai must ensure the impartiality of the election commission and eliminate the “ghost polling sites” at the center of the fraud ¨C demands the US is likely to support.

Yet he is no typical Afghan power-broker ¨C seeking a sweet deal from Karzai or backing his threats with cadres of rifle-carrying followers. In many respects, Abdullah is a uniquely complex character in Afghan politics.

A mixed past

On one hand, his past is tightly wound with the pearl jewelry warlords who cast Kabul into civil war during the early 1990s and have been accused of war crimes, killing thousands and leaving the capital in ruins. In 2007, when the international community balked at an Afghan bill that would have given these warlords immunity from past crimes ¨C a law written by the warlords themselves ¨C Abdullah was at the rally supporting his colleagues.

Yet, by nature, he is more technocrat than holy warrior. The son of a senator who served during the reign of King Zahir Shah ¨C Afghanistan’s last period of peace ¨C Abdullah was an eye surgeon before the Soviet invasion plunged him into resistance and then politics.

He served as Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban foreign minister ¨C five years under Karzai ¨C partly because he is respected throughout Afghanistan for his reason, moderation, and intelligence. He speaks English and French, he has a Facebook page, and his background straddles Afghanistan’s biggest ethnic fault line ¨C his father was Pashtun (the dominant ethnic group in the south) and his mother was Tajik (the dominant group in the north).

(His repetitive name is one result of this mix. Many Pashtuns in the south use only one name. But apparently, confusion at a news conference led to the mistaken supposition that his one name, Abdullah, was actually both a first and last name.)

Abdullah’s message

He has brought all the peculiar facets of his life to bear in a campaign that most experts predict he has virtually no chance of winning. In many respects, he is portraying himself as the Obama of Afghanistan ¨C offering change from the biwa pearl past eight years, in which Afghans have become increasingly disillusioned with Karzai.

The message can play well in America, too.

President Obama’s strategic review of the Afghan war was keyed by fears that the Karzai administration has become so rotted by corruption that it could not be a reliable partner in helping to build a secure Afghanistan. The concerns came to a head after the Aug. 20 election, which involved widespread corruption, largely in Karzai’s favor.

One major US newspaper, The Boston Globe, has called on the Obama administration to work behind the scenes for an Abdullah victory Nov. 7, saying “the United States can no longer be associated with the corrupt, abusive government of Hamid Karzai.”

Abdullah’s appearance on US television appeared to be an attempt to leverage these doubts to his advantage.

He said Sunday that corruption in Karzai’s government mean it cannot be reliable partner that the United States needs in order to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

“There is no doubt that the partnership has not akoya pearl been working well in the past few month and the past few years,” Abdullah said.

“Everybody knows the record of the past eight years. There was a golden opportunity” to establish security after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, he said. “That golden opportunity we missed” because of the failures of the “incompetent” Afghan government, he added.

What Abdullah wants

Abdullah also said he would refuse any overture to become a part of the Karzai government, dismissing talk of a behind-the-scenes power-sharing deal. If true, the statement is significant, in that much of Afghan politics is founded upon deals between opponents to share the spoils of power.

Indeed, one of Abdullah’s primary criticisms of the Karzai government has been it is prone to cronyism.

It is a result, he and others say, of how the international community designed the Afghan government in 2001. By creating a strongly centralized government ¨C with the urbane, Westernized Karzai at its head ¨C Afghanistan’s tendency to splinter along ethnic lines would be suppressed. Karzai, for example, chooses the governors for all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

But the situation leaves him ideally placed for doling out favors, and the corruption that has resulted has doomed the Afghan political experiment, he says.

Abdullah wants power in Afghan politics to be disbursed more evenly among the president, legislature, and local authorities. The platform is self-serving, since Abdullah is a member of the opposition. He is backed by the National Front, a group of former warlords now pushed to the margins of power.

Yet the commander of US forces in Afghanistan agrees with at least one aspect of Abdullah’s assessment: Afghanistan’s centralized government goes against the country’s political traditions and is in part responsible for the lack of law and order in rural areas.

“The top-down approach to developing government capacity has failed to provide services that reach local communities,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote in his battlefield assessment. “The Afghan government has not integrated or supported traditional community governance structures ¨C historically an important component of Afghan civil society ¨C leaving communities vulnerable to being undermined by insurgent groups and power-brokers.”

This week’s Northwest Airlines pilots isn’t the first to overshoot its landing in the past couple of years ¨C a fact that raises a wider question for air safety: Are regulators also falling down on the job?

The Minneapolis incident comes as members of Congress have been pressing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to set rules on pilot fatigue and professionalism in the cockpit.

FAA administrator Randolph Babbitt recently told lawmakers that his agency is working as fast as it can. “We just set a three-minute mile” in putting together draft regulations, he told a House subcommittee on aviation last month.

But questions about cockpit safety are recurring ones for the nation’s airlines, not something fresh on the FAA radar screen.

The Minneapolis case is notable because a major carrier, not a small regional airline, is involved. And the incident has garnered national attention for its eye-popping details. Flight 188 from San Diego overshot its pearl jewelry destination by 150 miles on Wednesday night, as flight controllers tried in vain to contact the crew for more than an hour.

The plane was flying over Eau Claire, Wis., and the Air National Guard had put fighter jets on alert to possibly intercept the plane, by the time it finally turned around for a safe landing of its 144 passengers at Minneapolis, according to news reports.

“The crew stated they were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness,” according to a statement released by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident. The plane’s black box was brought to Washington Friday, but the cockpit recorder is an older model that contains only the last 30 minutes of conversation, according to reports.

Some aviation experts express doubt about the biwa pearl plausibility of the initial explanation from the flight crew. At the very least, it would be unprofessional to engage in an argument when a plane is nearing its destination. The pilots, who have been temporarily suspended, will be interviewed next week.

Whether the explanation lies in bickering, sleepy pilots, or something else, the incident has raised new concerns about professional conduct in the skies.

The incident is not an isolated case. In 2008, sleeping pilots overshot their destination on a flight from Honolulu to Hilo, Hawaii, but then landed safely. In fatal crash of a Colgan Air flight near Buffalo, N.Y., earlier this year, both fatigue and unprofessional banter in the cockpit may have played a role.

At the hearing last month on Capitol Hill, some lawmakers voiced frustration that new regulations are not yet in place.

“We need things to be done now,” said Rep. Laura Richardson (D) of California. “We have people like myself and many people here in this room who are traveling every single day.”

In the case of fatigue, virtually all parties agree that new rules are needed to bring 50-year-old regulations up to date. On the wider issue of akoya pearl professional behavior, much can be achieved through better monitoring of flight crews, mentoring programs, and enforcing existing codes of conduct. But this too may require a strong effort by the FAA, safety experts say, not just voluntary actions by the airlines.

A commercial airline overshoots its destination by 150 miles? Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, yes actually.

Investigators are probing the mystery of how Northwest Airlines Flight 188 overshot Minneapolis by so far on Wednesday night. But the incident joins other recent cases that have drawn attention to issues of pearl jewelry flight-crew professionalism and alertness on US airlines.

The prominent examples include:

•Last year, two pilots for “go!”, a subsidiary of Mesa Airlines, fell asleep during a mid-morning flight from Honolulu to Hilo, Hawaii. Traffic controllers finally got through to the pilots, and the plane landed safely.

•Continental Connection Flight 3407, a flight operated by Colgan Air, crashed near Buffalo in February, killing 49 passengers and one person on the ground. Crew fatigue, distracting banter in the cockpit, and lack of training or experience may have played roles in the crash, along with wintry weather.

•Pinnacle Airlines Flight 4712 skidded off a runway in Traverse City, Mich., in April 2007. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the crew shouldn’t have tried to land. The captain was making his fifth landing on a short airstrip that day, according to the Associated Press, and had been working for biwa pearl 14 hours in mostly bad weather.

And, according to AP, the NTSB has linked crew fatigue to at least 10 US airliner accidents (and 260 fatalities) since 1990.

For years, the Federal Aviation Administration has considered updating old rules on fatigue prevention, but efforts stalled amid differing views from constituencies such as pilots unions.

Since the Colgan Air crash, the FAA has tried to put the matter on a fast track, along with other safety issues such as a heightened focus on professionalism in the cockpit. But the agency’s rulemaking efforts are still in process.

In the Colgan crash, and one in Lexington, Ky., crews violated “sterile cockpit” rules, requiring that officers not chit-chat during takeoffs or landings, according to recent congressional testimony by FAA administrator Randolph Babbitt.

Current rules on fatigue require that pilots not fly more than 8 hours in a day, or work more than 16 hours including time on the ground. But they don’t take into account the varied experiences of pilots.

An eight hour shift on short routes might include eight takeoffs and landings, for example, a much more stressful day than piloting a cross-country flight. Similarly, some crews work late at night or have long commutes by air before going on duty.

New FAA rules, under review in draft form, are expected to akoya pearl address such issues. Fatigue issues have also surfaced as a safety concern in other transportation fields, including trucking and railroads.

The Northwest Airlines incident this week, which ended with a safe (but late) landing in Minneapolis, could bring other issues to the fore, depending on where the investigation leads.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed an air safety bill backed by Rep. Jerry Costello (D) of Illinois. It includes provisions to establish pilot mentoring programs, boost training requirements for pilots, and create a pilot records database so airlines have access to a pilot’s comprehensive track record.

Despite the signs that more progress is needed, the air travel industry has remained generally very safe. The fatality rate has been declining in each of the past three decades, according to the Air Transport Association.

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