The Astronaut and is ready to let Reese out of the masquerade, but Reese and Gail are willing to carry on as if he "is" Brice Randolph. Reese then hears from a boy, who asked for an autograph, that the Soviets have just launched their own mission to land on Mars. The Astronaut The Astronaut is a 1972 American made-for-television science fiction film starring Jackie Cooper and Monte Markham. This made-for-television film follows a man who has been hired to impersonate an astronaut who died during the first manned mission to Mars. Television coverage of Brice Randolph, the first astronaut on the
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