One Russian, one French, and one Slovakian cosmonaut will reportedly take off for the Russian Space Station Mir Friday night. They could be the last team to ever staff the station.
According to Florida Today, the Russian government is running out of money to maintain Mir -- which requires about US$250 million a year in maintenance costs -- and has given the company that manages the space station a deadline of 30 April, 1999 to find another source of cash.
The three cosmonauts launching on Friday night are Viktor Afanasyev of Russia, Jean-Pierre Heignere of France, and Ivan Bella of Slovakia. They will launch aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:18 p.m. EST. The team will arrive at Mir on Monday morning.
The space station has been continuously occupied since 1986.
- - -
Cell phone makers enter talks: Qualcomm and Ericsson will meet to negotiate a settlement over the rights to Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), a protocol for wireless communications. The companies have been embroiled in a legal fight over the protocol for years.
Although neither company is discussing the progress of the negotiations, they hope to resolve the dispute before their 6 April trial date.
Ericsson brought the suit against Qualcomm in 1996, citing patent infringement. Qualcomm developed the CDMA protocol, but Ericsson says the technology is in violation of patents it holds.
