The delayed launch of this freighter is now on schedule for 19.11.1996 at 2320 UTC (for Moscow then already 20.11.1996). Progress-M33 will bring food, water, fuel, post, spare parts, 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 vacuum cleaner was out of order. Korzun denied this. Jokingly he supposed that someone produced this disinformation to get more money from the taxpayers for spaceflight.

Communications: Mir is passes take place during the day hours and a lot of radio traffic can be monitored. During the 5th pass within our range Mir is no longer in range of Russian tracking stations. Now and then the tracking station of ESA, Oberpfaffenhofen, relays Mir-TsUP communications during that pass. The packet radio 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.