Word: romanenko
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...past 15 months Katerli has been in court fighting charges that she defamed local Patriot society leader Alexander Romanenko by comparing passages in his book The Class Character of Zionism with Nazi writings. In her view, the official propaganda campaign against "Zionist racism" has been a form of sanctioned anti-Semitism. Now that glasnost is flourishing, she is worried about more virulent forms of prejudice as Russian nationalists seek a scapegoat to blame for seven decades of Communist misrule...
Another possible hazard on a long space journey has its source on planet earth: human nature. Soviet flights have demonstrated that performance levels begin to decrease as the days stretch into months. Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, whose 326 days aboard the space station Mir set a space endurance record last year, was down to only two hours of productive work a day toward the end of his eleven-month flight and had become decidedly peevish. "Leave me alone," he once snapped to mission control. "I have a lot of work...
Soviet space doctors seem more sanguine. While no American has stayed in space for more than three months, the Soviets have repeatedly staged manned flights of longer duration, capped by the 326-day stay of Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko last year aboard the orbiting space station Mir. "The experience of that flight," says Dr. Arkadi Ushakov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, "testifies that we should be optimistic about long-duration space flight. Our knowledge in the field of weightlessness is growing, and we are learning what countermeasures need to be taken to ensure health and safety...
Ushakov believes that two effects of prolonged weightlessness, calcium loss in bones and muscle atrophy, can be largely prevented by exercise. A strict regimen on a treadmill helped keep Romanenko's muscle tone and reduced the calcium loss to a degree that Ushakov calls insignificant. But other effects attributed to weightlessness are still cause for concern. "There is a general weakening of the immune system in a long-duration flight," Ushakov says. "When this happens, there is a danger that every microorganism present in the ship can cause infection...
James Oberg, a veteran U.S. Soviet space watcher, is impressed by Moscow's achievement but points to other serious physical dangers inherent in extended flights deeper into space. Perhaps the most significant: cosmic rays and high- energy radiation from the solar wind. Earth-orbiting space travelers like Romanenko are protected from this potentially deadly radiation by the earth's magnetic field. But, says Oberg, "there is no real experience anywhere on the effects of long-term, deep-space radiation exposure." Even so, with Romanenko's performance the Soviets bolstered their commanding lead over the U.S. in long-duration space flights...