THIS has been a busy week for space buffs. First, SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, an internet-payments firm, successfully launched its Dragon space capsule into orbit on May 22nd. Now, three days later, the Dragon made history by becoming the first private craft to dock with the International Space Station (ISS), after it was clasped by a robotic arm (see picture) and brought to a berthing port. All that remains is to unpack the half a tonne's worth of payload, including food and other supplies, it has ferried to the orbital station on behalf of NASA, America's space agency. In between Mr Musk's feats, Jeff Bezos, the internet tycoon behind Amazon, an online retailer, put the result of his space venture's engineering efforts, the prototype Charon craft, on display at Seattle's Museum of Flight.
Most momentous of all, though, could be a decision announced in Amsterdam just hours before Don Pettit, an American astronaut aboard the ISS, "got us a Dragon by its tail", as he put it. The board of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) consortium decided whether to build a new radio telescope in South Africa, whose bid was recommended by a panel set up to look into the matter, or Australia. In the event, the consortium decided to split the site between Boolardy Station in Western Australia and the Karoo in South Africa's Northern Cape.
Both sites are well-suited to radio telescopy. They are out of the way and experience little man-made radio interference from mobile-phone networks, television and radio broadcasts. The politic solution has been welcomed, officially at least, by the competing nations, though South Africa's ministry of science and technology sounded a slightly disappointed note in a statement. However, Bernie Fanaroff, who spearheaded the African bid, was ebullient about the prospect of his country hosting what is, physically speaking, the world's biggest scientific experiment (and, no doubt, the contracts that come with it).
The SKA may be less sexy than the Dragon and the ISS. It is certainly cheaper; its estimated €1.5 billion-2 billion ($1.9 billion-2.5 billion) price tag may be hefty as scientific projects go, but it pales in comparison with the $100 billion already poured into the ISS. Yet unlike the orbital station the radio telescope, 50-100 times more powerful than any predecessor, promises to do plenty of useful science, by exploring the formation of the first stars and galaxies, the role of magnetism in the early cosmos, the nature of dark matter, dark energy and gravity, and whether intelligent life has ever existed anywhere besides Earth.
