Space Station Crew Crash-Lands; Hawking Talks  Unintelligent
life exists elsewhere, cosmologist speculates. Did it design the
Soyuz capsule?   "Ballistic re-entry" is a pleasant-sounding
euphemism for what happened to Russia's Soyuz spacecraft on
Saturday, but from press accounts like this one by MSNBC, it
sounds as if the capsule basically crash-landed. What sort of
questions does this incident raise for the safety of continued
space exploration?  In other space exploration news,
accomplished astrophysicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking
stated last night that life probably exists on other planets but
that it may not be intelligent enough to communicate with us.
"Primitive life is very common, and intelligent life is fairly
rare," he said, according to the Associated Press. "Some would
say it has yet to occur on Earth."  Hawking endorsed human
exploration of space, saying, "If the human race is to continue
for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no
one has gone before."