The Encyclopedia Astronote (Космическая энциклопедия ASTROnote) site got hold of portraits of the latest cosmonaut selection (see my New Cosmonauts entry). Low-resolution photos, but better than nothing. Quick links to the photos on the site: Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Misurkin, Oleg Viktorovich Novitskii, Aleksei Nikolaevich Ovchinin, Maksim Vladimirovich Ponomarev, Sergei Nikolaevich Ryzhikov, Elena Olegovna Serova, Nikolai Vladimirovich Tikhonov.
Sy Liebergot is a “Paranoid Patriot” (perhaps typical of the cranky conservative types of his generation, though). A posting by him at CollectSPACE (in the Griffin says space shuttle was a mistake thread):
I was part of the original Space Station design and program office 1979-1986) before the program office was moved to Reston, VA. In my very personal opinion, NASA’s next big mistake was involving Russia and moving it into an orbital inclination of 51.6 deg. You see, one of our major forward planning features was to use the Station as a transportation node, i.e. construct upper stages on-orbit and head back to the Moon and on to Mars. We even planned a sample isolation module for Mars return samples. All that went away when we gave up on i=28.5 deg. and approx. 30% of payload lift capability. All this to save money. But then I rant.
Would be interesting to hear the Russian point-of-view about that!
(I just Googled “Paranoid Patriots” but apparently I didn’t make the term up – drats! My site comes up on the second page, though.)
I changed my blog over to the Blogger Beta (all blogs will have to soon, so I thought I might as well). It seems OK so far; I like being able to “label” entries.
“Darth Vader” gave me a nice mention on his blog. :-) I am still not sure if I am going to maintain this one yet. Somehow I don’t think anyone is interested in the topics I write about! I seem to have a habit of becoming interested in things few others care much about.
