The crew of NASA's space shuttle Atlantis is using English as their primary language, as not all of the American astronauts on the flight speak Russian, and the two cosmonauts "know enough English to laugh at my jokes", said shuttle pilot Scott Altman, acc'g to Louisville's Courier-Journal this morning. The space station is scheduled to have its first permanent residents in Nov. I haven't seen
anything that specifies that the primary language there will be English, but it makes sense to me that it would.

Today's article about the Olympics had some neat stories of individualized struggles to get to the Olympics: the two
Koreas are entered under one flag for the first time in 40
years; and the lady of Aboriginal descent, runner Cathy
Freeman, lit the inaugural torch.

We really are a planet of folks who want pretty much the same things. Celebrate diversity, but bless unity, too!

Here's the live NASA link:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/index.html