Ansari wins approval from her crewmates

An Interfax article today reports that Anousheh Ansari’s crewmates on the Soyuz launching late tonight, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin, are impressed with her “professionalism”, as Tyurin put it, during her pre-flight training. “She has easily become part of the crew. One could think we’d been working for years together,” Tyurin added. An interesting comment from Lopez-Alegria:

Lopez-Alegria said he had been critical of space tourism previously, but changed his mind after seeing the serious requirements Roscosmos applied to the candidates and the preparations. Anousheh did a serious and intense job, he said.

(One wonders what Lopez-Alegria thinks of suborbital space tourism, where the requirements will doubtless be much less stringent than orbital flights, but also won’t be piggybacking on regular ISS flights.)

The Interfax article also addresses the Iranian flag controversy, with Ansari saying that the flag she wanted to put on her spacesuit “had nothing to do with politics and only conveyed her personal attitude to the nation and its people.”

Leave a Reply

  

  

  

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>