Word: vasili
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...familiar problems for the pratfall-prone station. Four days before, the onboard computer failed--again. Shortly after, there was a touch-and-go moment as a cargo ship approached the station--again. Amid all this, the inevitable finger-pointing began. Russian President Boris Yeltsin suggested that recently returned crewmen Vasili Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin were largely responsible for the station's woes; at his postflight press conference, an indignant Tsibliyev denied the charge...
Understandably, Foale's original crewmates, Vasili Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin, probably won't be too sad about leaving Mir later this week. But even on Earth, their mission may continue to haunt them. Russian President Boris Yeltsin last week raised "the human factor" as the likely source of Mir's troubles. And adding to Tsibliyev's public embarrassment, Russian officials disclosed that because he was guiding Progress when it plowed into Spektr, he may not get his full flight bonus for his difficult six months in space...
Last week Linenger and cosmonaut Vasili Tsibliyev took a successful and widely publicized space walk outside the station. This week NASA plans to fly astronaut Mike Foale up to Mir, bringing to five the number of Americans who will have been Russia's orbital guests. Despite these successes, some in Washington are wondering whether it's safe for any American to set foot aboard the rickety ship. Even if Mir survives, others are asking, what does the sorry state of the craft say about Russia's ability to participate in future projects with the U.S.--particularly the long-planned international...
...knows how many tigers are left, but today Primorski province is estimated to have between 180 and 200, down from 350 in 1990. Vasili Solkin, the head of the Russian environmental group Zov Taigi, which means Roar of the Taiga, estimates that in 1993 alone, 75 to 80 tigers were killed, representing more than one-quarter of the remaining population. When traditional East Asian apothecaries ran out of sources for tiger skin and bones, which are used as medicine, among the places to which they turned for new supplies was Siberia. At the same time enforcement efforts collapsed as budgets...
...also a diverse ecosystem created in part by the meeting of the great tectonic plates that lie under North America and Eurasia. Mindful of Siberia's sorry record of leaky oil pipelines and catastrophic spills, the republic was hesitant to open this vulnerable area to drilling. Says Vasili Alekseev, the Minister of Ecology: "Since there is no truly clean technology to extract those reserves, we felt it better to create the Lena Delta Biosphere Reserve and protect the area. Perhaps in 50 or 100 years there will be a new technology for extraction, and then, if we still need...