MIRNEWS.333    13 NOVEMBER 1996

Progress-M33: The delayed launch of this freighter is now
on schedule for 19.11.1996 at 2320UTC (for Moscow then
already 20.11.1996).
Pr-M33 will bring food, water, fuel, post, spareparts,
etc to the station. The crew is anxiously waiting for
containers for the collection of 'human waste'. The
available containers are as good as full and the crew has
to 'improvise' measures to keep this situation under
control. They did not complain about this problem, but
have no appreciation for the fact that TV-stations in
Russia made it public as this caused anxiety among their
relatives. There also has been a publication about the
fact that their vacuumcleaner was out of order. Korzun
denied this. Jokingly he supposed that someone produced
this desinformation to get more money from the taxpayers
for spaceflight.

Communications:

MIR is passes take place during the
dayhours and a lot of radiotraffic can be monitored. 
During the 5th pass within our range MIR is no longer in
range of Russian trackingstations. Now and then the
tracking station of ESA, Oberpfaffenhofen, relays MIR-
TsUP communications during that pass. The packetradio
installation is regularly in use for radio-amateur
traffic on 145.800 mc. This P/R installation now and
then is used for service traffic on 143.625 mc.This
is not always successful and then TsUP used the old RTTY
installation as an alternative.

Chris v.d. Berg, NL-9165/A-UK3202.