Today in space history.

Today is the birthday of Valentin Ignatyevich Filatyev, one of the first pilots to be chosen for cosmonaut training.

Filatyev was by all accounts a good and decent and talented and well-liked cosmonaut; naturally, his story is a tragic one.

On March 27, 1963, Filatyev and two fellow cosmonauts (Nelyubov and Anikiyev) were detained by the MPs at Chkalovskiy. Apparently, all three men were drunk and disorderly. The MPs, perhaps being a bit star-struck by the cosmonauts, were quite willing to forget the entire incident. All they asked was that the men apologize. Filatyev and Anikiyev readily agreed. Nelyubov, however, refused.

Yuri Gagarin and the other members of the Sochi Six (Russia's equivalent of the Mercury Seven) pleaded on behalf of Filatyev and Anikiyev, but to no avail. On April 16, 1963, all three men were dismissed from the cosmonaut corps.

The subsequent discovery of an airbrush removal of Nelyubov from the "Sochi Six" photograph fueled Cold War speculation that there was a massive coverup in the Soviet space program and that cosmonauts who were anything less than perfect soon disappeared.

Nelyubov committed suicide by stepping in front of a train in 1966, Anikiyev died of natural causes at age 59, and Filatyev died of lung cancer in 1990.

Below: The original "Sochi Six" photograph, discovered by author James Oberg while he was searching for information on the "lost cosmonauts."

• Front row: A.G. Nikolayev; Y.A. Gagarin; S.P. Korolioff; Karpov; N.K. Nikitin.
• Back row: P.R. Popovich; G.G. Nelyubov; G.S. Titov; V.F. Bykovsky.

And here is the photo after it was doctored:

Happy Birthday, Buzz!

Unluckiest. group. ever.

Today would have been the birthday of Soviet cosmonaut Aleksandr V. Shchukin.
Shchukin was a test pilot for the eventually-scrapped Buran shuttle program.
He died when his SU-26M crashed on August 18, 1988.

Sadly, all but one of his fellow Buran Group members met untimely deaths, too.

Oleg G. Kononenko died at age 42 when he crashed his Yak-38 VTOL fighter while taking off from the carrier Minsk in the South China sea.

Anatoli S. Levchenko died at age 47 of a brain tumor.

Rimantas A. Stankiavicius died at age 46 when he crashed his Su-27 fighter at an airshow in Italy.

Igor P. Volk is the only member of Buran Group still alive; he retired from Gromov Flight Research Center in 2002.

After the Buran project was scrapped following the collapse of the USSR, the original shuttle remained in a hangar in Kazakhstan until it was totally destroyed (and 8 people were killed) when the hangar collapsed due to lack of maintenance a few years back.


Below: The windshield of shuttle OK-1K1 is visible through the rubble after the hangar collapse.

Experience with the space program? No. But he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Astros, 3. Cardinals, 0.

Today is the birthday...

of the worst. astronaut. ever.

Above: A post-fire party aboard Mir. The uninvited Jerry sulks in his bunk while the fun-loving Russians (and a token German) drink водка and, weepy with national pride the knowledge that they came really close to dying, belt out a slurred version of Гимн Советского Союза. Jerry complains that they're being really loud and he's trying to get some sleep, God, it's not easy doing all these science experiments but he guesses they just don't give a care about science at all and how would they like it if he sang real loud or something. They just laugh and Valeri Korzun starts a round of "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am" and everyone joins in except Aleksandr Lazutkin, who's floated off to find a barf bag because even though he's Russian, the stuff never really agreed with him. Probably. I don't know. I wasn't there. But I'll bet.

Whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back.

Saturn and Mimas

Cassini's image from today: Saturn and tiny Mimas.


It might be tiny; still, I'd keep an eye on it:

New Hubble image. Click to enlarge. Seriously. Click.

This is one of the most beautiful Hubble images yet.
Just released, snapped in November of 2008.

From HubbleSite:

January 15, 2009: The unique planetary nebula NGC 2818 is nested inside the open star cluster NGC 2818A. Both the cluster and the nebula reside over 10,000 light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis (the Compass).

This Hubble image was taken in November 2008 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The colors in the image represent a range of emissions coming from the clouds of the nebula: red represents nitrogen, green represents hydrogen, and blue represents oxygen.

Comet Lulin

Comet Lulin is on the way.

I can't wait to move away from (so much) light pollution.

I can't see poo.