America
and Russia may lose the
race to the moon, according to Edward Mukaka Nkoloso, Director-General
of the Zambia National Academy of Space Research.
His
ten Zambian
astronauts and a seventeen-year-old
African girl are poised for the countdown. He said: "I'll have my
first Zambian astronaut on the moon by 1965. My spacemen are ready, but
we're having a few difficulties…we are using my own firing system,
derived
from the catapult."
Mr.
Nkoloso
continued: "To really get going
we need about seven hundred million pounds. It sounds a lot of money,
but
imagine the prestige value it would earn for Zambia. But I've had
trouble
with my space-men and space-women. They won't concentrate on
space-flight;
there's too much love-making when they should be studying the moon.
Matha
Mwamba, the seventeen-year-old girl who had been chosen to be the first
coloured woman on Mars, has also to feed her ten cats, who will be her
companions on the long space flight… I'm getting them acclimatised to
space-travel
by placing them in my space-capsule every day. It's a 40-gallon oil
drum
in which they sit, and I then roll them down a hill. This gives them
the
feeling of rushing through space. I also make them swing from the end
of
a long rope. When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope – this
produces
a feeling of free fall."