"Jim Oberg" wrote in message
...
Behind the beautiful Soyuz launch: overcoming a communications emergency

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/597/1

by James Oberg
Monday, April 10, 2006

Behind the scenes of the beautiful blastoff two weeks ago of a Russian
Soyuz spacecraft with three men headed towards the International Space
Station, a critical communications blackout hit Mission Control in Moscow.
That emergency quickly passed without any harm to the mission or the crew.

And while the incident again raises the old issue of the bigger
"blackout" of long-standing Russian reluctance to occasionally keep its
American partners fully informed of potential problems, this new incident
provides evidence that things really are getting better. Mission Control
in
Houston had been apprised of the problem in real time and received all the
information it needed to make its own decisions.




Yep, it's nice of the Russians to let us tag along.

Maybe someday we'll have our own manned space
program again.


...............



By that time the men were safely in orbit, despite the communications
problem, and that was more than adequate reason for happiness. And there
is
something about the maturing space partnership, also concerning
communications, that also did work, and that is grounds for additional
happiness. And once we learn what really happened with the cabin pressure
loss on the last Soyuz landing, we'll all be happier still.