The flight of a cosmonaut on STS 60 in February 1994 began Phase 1 of the international Space Station.

The spaceship transported a crew consisting of United States astronaut Leroy Chiao and Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov and also cosmonaut Yuri Shargin, who went for a 10 day orbital mission and then returned on 24 October together with the crew of the ninth main mission who had worked on the Station for six months.

NASA astronauts Bonnie Dunbar and Norm Thagard have been training to fly on the Mir space station since March 1994 at the Russian Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City.

In Russia, you get asked for your autograph if you are a proper hero an ice hockey player, a cosmonaut, a high society prostitute, or, like Lugovoi, an executioner.

This culturally desiccated world is much more alien than the red desert of the Martian landscape that Tereshkova and her cosmonaut friends including her husband dreamed of in their youth. The collapse of the country for which she lived underscores her overwhelming sense of tragedy.

Progress M 50 took to the ISS fuel components, water, service equipment and supplies, instruments for scientific experiments, 28 mini containers with food and personal parcels for Gennady Padalka, the pilot cosmonaut, and Edward Michael Fincke, the flight engineer, as well as for the next crew, who were to leave for the Station on 9 October.

The crew of that mission, Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and astronaut Edward Michael Fincke of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States, took over from the crew of the eighth main mission, Alexander Kaleri and Michael Foel, who during their six months on board the ISS had carried out numerous scientific experiments, more than 40 of them part of the Russian programme.