Cosmic Scenicruiser?
"To the cosmos!" became the battle cry of early Soviet cosmonauts. But after taking almost unbearable punishment in centrifuges, vibration seats, and other diabolical training devices that simulated rocket flight, they a mended the motto: "To the cosmos - by bus!"

Tom the Linguist
Preparing for their joint space flight, the three American astronauts - Stafford, Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, and Vance Brand - and their two Russian colleagues - Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov worked hard at learning each other native tongue. Still, Leonov fluent in English, joked that the mission actually had three official languages: Russian, English, and "Oklahomski." The last, he said, was only way to describe the Russian spoken by drawling, Oklahoma born Tom Stafford.

Speaking of Language
There was yet another language spoken in Houston during the Apollo-Soyuz preparation, a Russian journalist reported. He wrote from the Texas space center that "We kept hearing strange words - 'okeiski,' 'okeichik'...
Finally a Russian asked, "What language are you speaking?"
"The language of the joint flight,' replied astronaut Eugene Cernan. "We have mixed English-Russian and Russian-English words and phrases, and the mixture we call 'Ruston.'" In Ruston - a combination of Russian and Houston - "okeiski" translated as A-Okay, and "okeichik" meant an alright guy.

Hmm, Curious
Just hours before the Skylab breakup in space, a large piece fell off a four-foot-long spacecraft model at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Museum employees called the coincidence "bizarre." The model: Skylab.

No Sleepwear
Champion in the mail department during the Apollo moon flights was Neil Armstrong. Many of the letters to the first moonwalker came from children, who often asked for autographs, space literature, moon rocks, and spare spacecraft parts, and enclosed their space drawings. Typical was this note from an ambitious four-year-old boy in California:
"Dear Mr. Armstrong: Daddy and me are going to make a rocket because I wanted to for years and years and years. Please can we have some materials. Bring us some real space suits instead of pajamas."

Secret Agent Boy
A boy in Tennessee seemed to confuse NASA and UFOs with the CIA and FBI. Obviously flying-saucer fan, he wrote the space agency:
"I want to join up as a spy at UFO. I am 9 years old. I can hide in bushes, gullies, trees, behind rocks better than a man. I learned all that in Nashville, Tennessee.
P.S. I've been studying UFOs science I was 3 years old."

Weather Report
The moon of course, has no atmosphere - which explains why chuckles were heard at Mission Control when astronaut Roosa radioed the followings keep observation soon after Apollo 14 reached lunar orbit:
"We picked a nice, clear day to arrive - not a bit of haze here."
Replied his straight man on the ground: "Incredible."

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