6 + 1 = lucky (seven)

Few days ago, the Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) announced its latest selection of cosmonauts candidates. The six men and one woman (most younger than me! :-\ ) will start their 2 years training early next year at the Yuri Gagarin center. As always, the Russian space program is kept in a shroud of secrecy so biographical data on each of the candidate is pretty much non existent (well aside of their names and affiliation, five Air Force officers and two Energiya engineers). BTW, if you are looking for more info on the current (or past) cosmonauts, make sure to visit Suzy's web site, she got a nice (and up-to-date) section just for that.

Late last week, I was working on having the Vzor (periscope) break free (if it wasn't jettisoned earlier) in the early stage of the SA (reentry module) reentry. It was working fine, but seeing it flying trought the body of the SA was bugging me a bit (Orbiter doesn't come with collision handling, but there is a 3rd party solution).So I decided to get sidetracked a bit and work on the collision detection and handling for our addon(s) ... Like we didn't have enough to do already! 9_9 ... It's definitely quiet interesting and challenging to do ... I just hope it won't be too much over my head ... especially the Rigid Bodies part of it (right now I'm still working on the collision detection). This should make docking quiet interesting and a bit more realistic ... docking probes will glide down the docking female cone ... too much delta-V will put strain on the docking apparatus ... possibly damaging it (e.g Soyuz 10) ... Obviously, this is a important thing to have in an add-on, definitely worth the headaches I have been suffering for the past few days ...