Word: cosmonaut
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...science-fiction fan. The crew of a rocket ship returns to earth after a long space voyage only to find everything changed. It was exactly that way for Sergei Krikalev. When he blasted off in May 1991, he was one of the proudest of elites, a Soviet cosmonaut. Last week, when he came back after 313 days in orbit, he found a different world...
...country would disintegrate before his mission was over? By the time October rolled around, the Baikonur facility was on the verge of belonging to Kazakhstan , rather than the Soviet Union. As a public relations measure, space-program authorities decreed that instead of a sending a replacement for the cosmonaut, a native Kazakh should go up for a short and politically expedient visit. Poor Krikalev got some fresh supplies but no relief. Ten months after his sojourn began, he's still circling the earth every 90 minutes, day and night, stranded 350 km above the planet. He may finally come down...
...illusion that humanity is separate from the natural order. For that reason alone, The Home Planet (Addison-Wesley; $19.95), an elegant compilation of photos taken during American and Soviet space missions, might be the first text in a syllabus for environmental re-education. In quotes accompanying the pictures, cosmonauts and astronauts from more than a dozen nations struggle to express the transcendental experience of seeing how life has invested our planet with a luminous beauty. Writes Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov: "So touchingly alone, our home must be defended like a holy relic...
Never before had the world received so stunning a glimpse of a Soviet space crisis. Cramped inside a tiny capsule 155 miles above the earth, Commander Vladimir Lyakhov radioed mission control that something was desperately wrong. Seated beside him was a hastily trained Afghan cosmonaut, Abdul Ahad Mohmand. Replied a ground controller: "How are things with food?" Lyakhov: "There is no food." Controller: "What about the emergency rations?" Lyakhov: "They are there, but why touch them? We will be patient," he added, noting that there was no way to rid themselves of wastes...
When the re-entry manuever was attempted again, three hours later, the rocket abruptly stopped after just seven seconds. Reason: it had apparently not occurred to either the cosmonauts or the ground controllers to reprogram the computer for the spacecraft's new position. Lyakhov responded by pressing a manual button to restart the engine, but the computer again cut off the rocket. Admitted the cosmonaut afterward: "I am not excusing myself. There was fault there...