[FPSPACE] Russia names politician to military cosmonaut corps

[Woods, Dave]

Two interesting items with this posting.  First, I believe this is the first
mention of the name of "Alpha" by anyone from the Russian side, other 
than the current ISS crew.  Previous postings had suggested that it 
had connotations of "Alpha" meaning the first space station, and thus 
ignoring the contributions of earlier Salyut, Mir and Skylab stations.
Looks like the name is being accepted.

Secondly, the Aerospace Daily article itself was prepared by Dmitry 
Pieson, one of our Russian contributors to discussions on FPSPACE.  
Congratulation,  Dima.  We look for many more.

Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	JamesOberg@aol.com [SMTP:JamesOberg@aol.com]
> Sent:	Thursday, November 09, 2000 11:05 AM
> To:	fpspace@friends-partners.org
> Subject:	[FPSPACE] Russia names politician to military cosmonaut
> corps
> 
> 
> Aerospace Daily, Nov 9, 2000
> 
> Russia names politician to military cosmonaut corps
> 
	<snip>

>      "I can't say for sure what program I am going to be trained for,"
> Loktionov told The DAILY. "If [Mir] station is working, I will go there;
> otherwise, I will be training for the ISS. Actually, the [ISS] Service
> Module is practically the same Mir-2 we were designing for a long time
> before they even started to talk about Alpha station. And as for Mir-2, I
> even got an invention certificate together with the group of engineers who
> designed a new airlock structure."
>      - Dmitry Pieson (dpieson@mail.ru)
>