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Pranks Show Lighter Side of Mir
Mark Padro writes "www.The Moscow Times has posted this article. In one instance
...Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov managed to chat to a truck driver on a road in South Africa as he flew hundreds of kilometers overhead in 1992... It's a good article with other funny Mir stories." Oh those wacky cosmonauts. Ya know, hiding booze around the space station is an early warning sign of alcoholism.
It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, ten years into the cold war. The Mir Project was a dream given form. Its goal, to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and alcohol could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call - home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and IP laws. Humans and alcohol wrapped in two million, 140 thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace. This is the story of the last of the Mir stations. The year is 2001. The name of the place is space station Mir.
Dragonfly, by Bryan Burrough.
Actually, Soyuz spacecraft have a gun onboard as part of the standard kit. It's included in the emergency kit along with first aid supplies and survival equipment in case of a landing in some remote area. The gun has a folding stock with that doubles as a saw, and it has two barrels, one for signal flares and one that fires a real bullet. The design requirement was that it should be powerful enough to stop a bear if the Soyuz crew ever found themselves stranded in the wilderness after a landing, although I doubt it's really that big.
Themoscowtimes.com doesn't work for me. However this should be the same article.
--Ryan
Took just a few minutes to slashdot that server. Here is a mirror based on what I was able to download.
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FOX Channel brings you a provocative documentary: Mir re-entry was faked! Join us tonight as we explore the web of secrets and cover-ups and learn the never-before-heard truth about the Mir space-station and what really happened in March 2001.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Pranks Show Lighter Side of Mir
By Simon Saradzhyan
Staff Writer
Working in an old tin can 300 kilometers above the Earth is serious business, but even so the occupants of the Mir space station have shared a few lighthearted moments during the ship's 15-year life.
The fun times were not all inspired by the videos and bottles of brandy sent up to help the cosmonauts and astronauts unwind after a day of grind aboard the station, which was to be dumped into the Pacific Ocean on Friday morning.
Between experiments, the crew played jokes on newcomers and even on unsuspecting people back on Earth.
One favorite prank was tapping on the station's window to knock off space dust. With the sun's rays brightly illuminating the particles of dust and no background to judge their size, the cosmonauts easily tricked newcomers into believing that nothing less than UFOs were slowly passing by.
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov managed to chat to a truck driver on a road in South Africa as he flew hundreds of kilometers overhead in 1992.
Krikalyov sneaked an amateur radio onboard Mir and used it to establish a link with the truck driver, who was heading to Kimberley.
The unsuspecting driver thought it was one of his colleagues driving on a nearby road and called Krikalyov a prankster when the cosmonaut said was he was heading for America via India and China.
Despite Krikalyov's efforts to explain that he was actually talking from high above, the South African refused to believe the cosmonaut. The driver rogered "See you in Kapstadt," as he signed off.
Such pranks, however, were arguably dwarfed by a joke that cosmonaut Alexei Leonov pulled on a crewmate in a two-man spacecraft that was a predecessor to Mir.
Leonov's comrade accidentally locked himself in a compartment. He spent several minutes banging on the locked door and shouting, only to hear Leonov finally murmur: "Who's there?" recalls Russian space agency spokesman Vyacheslav Mikhailichenko.
When the Mir crew ran out of alcohol reserves, they would often go on "treasure-seeking" expeditions for more, tearing down interior panels to find bottles hidden by previous crews, said Alexander Poleshchuk, who spent six months on board Mir in 1993.
"Sometimes we would bump into a bottle of cognac. What a joy it was," Poleshchuk said in a recent interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda.
But unlike cosmonauts -- who for luck urinate on the back tire of the bus that takes them to the launch pad -- the officials who command them from Mission Control near Moscow prefer to remain "serious" and "concentrated," said Viktor Blagov, Mir's deputy control chief.
"No, we don't do anything like that on our control panels," Blagov added, laughing.
About 32,000 Americans are killed by guns every year. I can't find a similar figure for Russia. They do have a lot more violent deaths than the U.S., but it's mostly organized crime stuff, not the casual violence we're so fond of. And only one Russian household in 20 has any kind of firearm, as opposed to 1 in 2 in the U.S. There are 200 million privately-owned guns in the U.S.
I think when it comes to life-shortening stupidity, the two countries are neck and neck, though each excels in specific areas.
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You bet. That Vyacheslav Trubitsin was quite a man.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
The Russian Duma, being of a significantly more nationalist and less realistic bent than the Kremlin, is continually attempting to ignore reality with respect to their space program. Check the link at http://www.nasawatch.com to Pravda, where an official communication of the Duma has already asked for the RASA (Russian Aeronautics and Space Administration) chief's head for allowing their station to go down.
Other interesting points to take away from their communique:
* They absolutely refuse to consider the possibility that they didn't have the money to keep Mir operational or even in a safe orbit.
* They already want a new station. Never mind that there were only four core modules built: The MIR core module, now half-melted in the South Pacific; the training module, sitting in Star City and needed for ISS training; the Zvezda service module (which is an updated MIR core module); and the mock-up, sitting in a museum (not sure which). Remember how much trouble getting Zvezda built was?
* Remember how like pulling teeth it was to get the money for Zvezda out of the *very same Duma*? They want the nationalism and prestige of a space program, but they don't want to pay for it. They want to pay for MIR 2 by "letting the Americans pay our share of ISS costs". Let's think about this a second... we just found out that *we* are overbudget, we are stretching *our* contribution out to who knows when (2007 for completion now? 2008?), and they want us to pay their whole share, so they can throw up a competing station? On what planet do these people think they are living on?
* They are concerned about insane things like "we can't use the ISS for military purposes". (Exactly how did they use Mir for military purposes? Skylab? Salyut? Spy satellites and commsats are *so* much more cost efficient for military use that this isn't even funny.)
The general Russian thought on ISS comes down to something like this:
RUSSIAN DUMA: What happen?
RUSSIAN MISSION CONTROL: Someone set up us the re-entry!
RUSSIAN MISSION CONTROL: We get signal from Houston.
RUSSIAN DUMA: What!
RUSSIAN MISSION CONTROL: Main screen turn on.
AMERICAN MISSION CONTROL: How are you gentlemen!!
AMERICAN MISSION CONTROL: All your space stations are belong to us.
RUSSIAN DUMA: What you say??
AMERICAN MISSION CONTROL: You are on the path to insignificance.
AMERICAN MISSION CONTROL: You have no chance to economically recover make your time.
RUSSIAN DUMA: Take off every 'MIR 2'.
RUSSIAN DUMA: You know what you doing.
RUSSIAN DUMA: Move 'MIR 2' for great justice.
This is so close to the typical Duma member's thought patterns that I can't decide if it's funny or not....
Your friendly neighborhood nitpicker,
Allen Bryan,
Your friendly neighborhood nitpicker
the titanium balls that were supposedly 'fuel' containers - were actually not titanium. The Russian government, in order to reduce expenses, actually purchased these containers from the Hatfields, it was surplus distillery equipment... and being so, it was used as such - i'm sure that tests on the surving, floating balls will show high levels of alcohol in them.
-deuxdrop