С Днем Космонавтики! It is 46 years since Yurii Gagarin was launched.
Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin said that Bill Gates is considering a flight into space (he could probably afford to fund his own space program if he were inclined to).
From Novosti Kosmonavtiki news №619:
The number of people wishing to become cosmonauts has decreased considerably
For modern youth, a cosmonaut career has ceased to be prestigious, Pavel Vinogradov, the chief of the flight-test department of Rocket & Space Corporation (RKK) Energiya declared to journalists at the Baikonur cosmodrome. “If in 1985-1988 RKK Energiya examined some hundreds of applications in a year from candidates for the cosmonaut group, now the number of interested persons is only 20-30 people in a year,” Vinogradov complained. In the autumn of 2006 he returned to the Earth after a six-month expedition on the International Space Station. According to Vinogradov, the decline of prestige of the cosmonaut profession in society is in many respects connected with the low level of material compensation for work of the cosmonaut who receive the salary, “as ordinary engineers.” Interfax reported this.
