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.

Comments

It can be a dangerous place...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Gun carrying Russians

[Kartoffel]

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.

Working Link

[AiX2]

Themoscowtimes.com doesn't work for me. However this should be the same article.

--Ryan

Slashdotted

[FTL]

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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I bet we'll see this in a few years:

[Mr_Icon]

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.

Re:Stop the stereotypes!

[fm6]

Well, the average Russian consumes the equivalent of 4 gallons of pure alcohol a year. That's more than any country on the planet, and about twice what the average American consumes. Every year, 34,000 Russians die from simple ethanol toxicity. That's about ten times the number in the US.

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.

__

Re:I wish I was a cosmonaut

[Denial of Service]

I wonder if they wrote their names in urine...

You bet. That Vyacheslav Trubitsin was quite a man.

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