С днем рождения!

Yes, I do feel somewhat ashame that with all my focus on the Soviet/Russian space program ... I still totally forgot about the 100th anniversary of Sergey Korolyov birth this past Friday (01/12) :-( Lorne Ipsum have written in The Space Review a rather nice article on The Chief Designer impact on the human space adventure, which by all accounts was definitely a talented and far seeing manager, but not the kind of person with whom it was easy to work with. In fact, he appears to have been in some occasion a very stubborn bully. Oh well ... no one is perfect, even (especially) people leaving major legacy in history. To mark the event, the next Progress spacecraft (M-59 to be launched on the 18th) to head for the ISS will have on the shroud an image of Korolyov. There's some nice pictures (links) to the assembly sequence of it in a thread of the NASASpaceflight.com forum.

Once again, Suzy have added a nice post to her blog. This one is on some comments made by Pavel Vinogradov (Exp 13's commander) regarding the state of the Russian space program. It's kind of sad indeed :-\