The father saw off the Soviet Union. Could the son now bury Putin’s Russia?
We live in troubled times. There’s terrorism. Global warming, of course. Wars, famine, bird flue & celebritneys.
There’s always something new threatening us and our beleaguered planet - when it’s not some old problem that never really went away, or some old instrument of doom whose time’s come round again, in some recycled form.
In other words, president Putin must be a deeply worried man right now.
One moment he’s as happy as any evil gnome can be, having made sure his successor will, like Pinocchio, happily dance on his strings (but without that whole free will, conscience and the tell-tale nose nonsense.)
The next moment he learns that his own space agency has conspired against him, in a bid to destroy everything that the president has tried to create.
So, right now we have Putin praying that that old saying ‘Like father, like son’ won’t come true this time round:
The cosmonaut Sergei Volkov is setting a new space record by boldly going where his father has gone before. Mr Volkov, 34, will become the world’s first second-generation space traveller when he takes off on a Soyuz rocket on a mission to the International Space Station next month.
Sergei Volkov will make his debut flight on April 8 in an 11-day mission to the International Space Station with his fellow Russian Oleg Kononenko and South Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So Yeon, a nanotechnology engineer.
He will be following in the slipstream of his father, an illustrious veteran cosmonaut whose country disappeared while he orbited the Earth in the Mir space station.
Alexander Volkov, 59, left Earth as a citizen of the Soviet Union in October 1991. When he returned in March 1992, after six months on Mir, the Soviet Union had been dissolved and he was a citizen of Russia.
So, God knows what kind of subtle or catastrophic changes young Sergei will witness when he returns – but chances are it won’t include a smiling Putin.
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