The book “Dynamics of Space Flight” by Davide Borghi and Marco Busato is now being printed by Levrotto & Bella, Turin.

Hague Tribunal: Radislav Krstic sentenced to 46 years in prison on genocide charges for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacres.

Pirelli and Benetton, in a surprise operation, acquire control of Olivetti and then, in a cascade, of Tecnost, Telecom, Tim, Seat-PagineGialle

Rodolphe Kasser, an expert Coptic translator, sees for the first time the Codex Tchacos, containing the Gospel of Judas, purchased by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art

The Indonesian parliament has appointed Megawati Sukarnoputri, winner of the last elections, as president, succeeding Abdurrahman Wahid who had been in office for only 2 years.

Shuttle Atlantis STS104 carries the ISS Quest module into orbit, which now has a habitable volume equal to that of Mir.

The MAP (Microwave Anisotropy Probe) is launched towards the L2 Lagrangian point (opposite the Sun)

Slobodan Milosevic is extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague; the prosecutor is Carla Del Ponte.

Microsoft Won’t Be Split Up by Antitrust

Silvio Berlusconi Prime Minister of Italy

At Juntendo University in Tokyo, the genetic code of staphylococcus is decoded.

The two Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were blown up: the older one (3rd century) was 35m high, the other (4th century) was 54m.

Bones of Ardipithecus Ramidus Kadabba from 5.2-5.8 million years ago discovered

At Lake Turkania in Kenya, Mary Leakey discovers bones of Kenyanthropus Playtops (Kenyan Flat-Faced Dinosaur).

MIR: As early as 1998, the decision was made to deorbit MIR: every dollar spent on MIR was a dollar taken from the ISS. The Russians initially agreed, but reluctantly. Various proposals arose to save it, right up until the final day. On March 23, 2001, it deorbited: it entered the atmosphere above Japan and was torn to pieces, first the solar panels, then the protruding structures. The inhabitants of Fiji saw the sad spectacle of eight flaming streaks in the sky, followed by sonic booms. MIR represents to the Russians what the Apollo Program represents to the Americans. On MIR, in over 13 years, 2/3 of the time in orbit of all astronauts was spent, 27 long-stay expeditions, 69 unmanned dockings, 11,762 total days spent on board (87% with Russians, 8% Americans, 5% others), 3,640 days of continuous occupation, 104 people (42 Russians, 44 Americans, 18 others), 9 shuttles docked, 742 days on MIR for Sergei Avdeev, Enormous amount of scientific and technological experiments. 149 spacewalks by 36 cosmonauts, for 691 hours (29 days), Anatoli Soloviev spent 74 hours and 41 minutes on spacewalks. It was decommissioned 40 years after Yuri Gagarin’s flight (12 April 1961).

The Taliban decide to tear down the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, and take away women’s last rights, including the right to laugh, etc.

The NEAR Shoemaker probe, after successfully landing off-programme on the surface of the asteroid Eros, sends its last data back to Earth. Then Eros’s winter arrives, and NEAR’s solar panels no longer collect enough light, and the probe shuts down. The probe is still there and will remain there for millions of years.

Shuttle Atlantis STS98 carries the ISS Destiny module into orbit, which now has a mass of 112 tons.

NASA finds further signs of fossil life on two more Martian meteorites: Nakhla and Shergotty, 1.3 billion years old and 170 million years old respectively, and confirms signs of life on ALH84001; it also confirms the presence of underground liquid water on Europa and Callisto and, in the past, on the surface of Ganymede.

NASA’s NEAR probe is landing on the Near-Earth asteroid “Eros”, the fifth extraterrestrial body touched by a functioning human probe (the others are the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter – – others will be added later such as Titan in 2005 and recently several asteroids); it will be composed of a few monolithic megablocks in turn composed of material similar to that of the Moon.

The human genome is published (Celera Genomics publishes in the American journal Science while the Anglo-American public consortium Human Genome Project publishes in the English journal Nature); it turns out to be composed of only 30,000 genes (against the 90,000 expected).

Texas-based multinational energy company Enron files for bankruptcy. Investors lose $11 billion.

Humans weigh 350 times as much as all the world’s bison and elephants combined, and more than 10 times as much as all the world’s wild mammals. Combined with all domesticated animals, humans account for more than 97% of the mass of land mammals. Twenty centuries earlier, at the birth of Christ, the entire human race weighed only two-thirds of all the bison in North America, and less than one-eighth of all the elephants in Africa.

Evidence for a meteorite impact as the cause of the P-Tr extinction event 250 million years ago has been found; one piece of evidence is the “extraterrestrial” proportion of helium and argon in air bubbles in rocks from that era found in China, Hungary, and Japan; other evidence concerns the geologically brief nature of the mass extinction.

Justin Khoury, Burt Ovrut, Paul Steinhardt, and Neil Turok devise the Ekpyrotic Universe, a cyclic universe that exploits string theory. It is actually two parallel three-dimensional universes (brane worlds) that periodically move apart and back together until they violently impact, exploiting one of the additional dimensions, which has remained very small, perhaps because it was unaffected by the initial inflation. This could provide a clue to explaining why gravity is so weak compared to the other two forces. Indeed, gravity could act in all dimensions of space, including the parallel brane world, while the other three forces do not. This would also explain why there is much less luminous matter than gravitational matter. The parallel brane world would be gravitationally very close (less than a millimeter apart) but optically incredibly distant.

The Hubble Space Telescope examines the composition of the atmosphere of the exoplanet HD 209458b.

The Hubble and Chandra space telescopes independently provide evidence for the presence of event horizons in some candidate black holes.

After several recounts of the votes and several Supreme Court rulings, Al Gore renounces further appeals: George W. Bush is president

Documents relating to the first computer, Colossus, built in 1943-44 and used to decrypt Nazi messages, were declassified by the American government, but not the crucial role played by Colossus in decrypting Nazi teletype messages, which was declassified only in 2000. The British government had released the first photographs of the Colossus computer only in 1975.

Two Russians and an American are the first inhabitants of the International Space Station

Russell Vreeland and colleagues at West Chester University in Pennsylvania announced the resurrection of Bacillus Permians bacteria found 600 meters underground in Carlsbad, New Mexico. They are reviving in the presence of water after 250 million years, having survived all this time and two mass extinctions like spores in a salt crystal. A year later, a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution by researchers Dan Graur and Tal Pupko raises serious and detailed doubts about the spores’ ability to survive for 250 million years, primarily because the spores do not contain active DNA repair enzymes, so the DNA is expected to decay into small fragments due to factors such as natural radioactive radiation in the soil, and the bacterium is expected to lose its viability within several hundred years at most.

A suicide attack using a boat packed with explosives on the USS Cole, anchored in the port of Aden in Yemen, kills 17 sailors; hours of frantic work follow aboard the ship to prevent it from sinking while the dead and wounded are evacuated.

A million people storm Belgrade’s parliament: it’s the end of Milosevic’s regime.

Moderate democratic opposition wins Serbian elections against Milosevic, elections later annulled

The Codex Tchacos, containing the Gospel of Judas, after being evaluated by Yale University and its purchase rejected, is sold by Frieda Nussberg to Bruce Ferrini who freezes it thus undermining its integrity forever.

In Mexico, the right-wing opposition wins the elections after 71 years of Revolutionary Party rule.

The bridge-tunnel between Denmark and Sweden is inaugurated

The homicide rate in Western Europe is around 1 per 100,000 people per year (0.001%/year). In Italy, for example, it was 70 per 100,000 people per year (0.070%/year) in 1450. Even in the southwestern United States (where in 1860 it was 200 per 100,000 people per year or 0.2%/year) it has dropped to less than 10 per 100,000 people per year (0.010%/year).

With 1000 British pounds you can sequence 10,000 bases of DNA; in 1968, 20 were sequenced.

The Ulysses probe makes its second flyby of a solar pole.

Giuliano Amato to govern Italy

Bill Clinton eliminated Selective Availability distortion in the GPS signal. The US government thus chose to remove the intentional deterioration in GPS accuracy for public use (Selective Availability). The “military” precision of GPS became usable by the general public, free of charge. Six years earlier, I had written my thesis on an aerospace application of this system, and at the time I fully understood the significance of this decision, which is now clear: GPS is used daily by everyone. And also the importance of having this lever, which I compare to John Harrison’s invention of portable watches for maritime use to calculate longitude precisely (there’s a great book by Dava Sobel), which was long jealously guarded as a military secret by the Royal Navy… Today, GPS is supported by several other similar or complementary satellite systems: GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (Europe), Beidou (China), QZSS (Japan), IRNSS (India).

Shanghai, China. Richard Chang, a former Texas Instruments employee, founded SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), raising more than $1.5 billion from international investors such as Goldman Sachs, Motorola, and Toshiba. He aims to replicate in China what TSMC has done in Taiwan.