Via the Rocketeers blog comes the video interview with Helen Sharman, one of the first genuine civilian space travelers and the first Briton to go to space.

(I’ll note that she was in no way the first  space tourist, though she is sometimes referred to as that. She did not decide to go to space and then made it happen with her own resources. She was instead selected in a competition with thousands of other people and her scientific background strongly influenced that selection.)

Anatoly Zak writes about the launch disaster at Xichang on February 15, 1996 and includes information from an American who was at the launch: Disaster at Xichang: An eyewitness speaks publicly for the first time about history’s worst launch accident  – Air & Space Magazine.

Here’s a video of the launch and of the village the next day:

Every so often there is another article on the history of the Fisher Space Pen and the myth that NASA paid big bucks for it instead of having the astronauts use pencils in space: The Fisher Space Pen Boldly Writes Where No Man Has Written Before – Design Decoded/Smithsonian – Jan.11.13.

See other articles on the pen here.