Fallen Astronaut Fallen Astronaut Fallen Astronaut is an aluminium sculpture created by Paul Van Hoeydonck. It is a small stylized figure, meant to depict an astronaut in a spacesuit, intended to commemorate the astronauts and cosmonauts who have died in the advancement of space exploration. It was commissioned and placed on the Moon by the crew of Apollo 15 at Hadley Rille on August 1, 1971, next to a plaque listing the fourteen men known at the time to have died. The crew kept the memorial's existence a secret until after completion of their mission. After public disclosure, the National Air and
Chinese as a foreign language Chinese in Europe. In 1837, Nikita Bichurin opened the first European Chinese-language school in the Russian Empire. Since then sinology became an academic discipline in the West, with the secular sinologists outnumbering the missionary ones. Some of the big names in the history of linguistics took up the study of Chinese. Sir William Jones dabbled in it; instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor. Local Chinese variants were still widely used up until a Qing dynasty decree in 1909 that mandated Mandarin as the official language of