Ed Lu, Valery Tokarev and Greg Olsen- Live from Croatia!

Not since Yuri Gagarin’s visit 46 years ago has a space explorer come to this part of the world. Now Ed Lu, recently retired US Astronaut; Valery Tokarev, an active Cosmonaut who has flown on the Shuttle and Soyuz; and Greg Olsen, the third private space explorer to visit the International Space Station (ISS) are joining some of the newer suborbital space hopefuls for a panel discussion each evening on human space exploration.

After the Shuttle Columbia disaster, Lu was asked to launch on a Soyuz as the Flight Engineer (the first time an American had filled that role), since they needed to launch with a crew of two- not three. He had to learn a year and a half worth of material in nine weeks. After talking to him at dinner last night- I have no doubt he could pick up whatever he wanted in nine weeks. He ended up spending six months in space on that mission.

Tokarev was originally to be the pilot for the Buran, a Russian vehicle that looks very similar to the Space Shuttle. However the Buran only flew an un-piloted test flight before being moth-balled in the 90’s. Luckily Tokarev got a second chance and has flown and spacewalked with the Russians and the Americans. It was his Soyuz launch that brought Greg Olsen for his 10 day stay on ISS.

Olsen first got the idea to go into space reading about Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth’s flights in a newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey. Olsen is an engineer and businessman and even worked to bring a few experiments of his own to space before getting derailed by US regulations and other logistical issues. Olsen was the third of five people to have paid to visit the space station. He was followed by space blogging sweetheart Anousheh Ansari and Microsoft millionaire Charles Simonyi.

They are all here thanks to the passionate efforts of a band of young Croatia astronomers and astrophysicists committed to creating a renaissance of science and technology in their country- a country whose constitution is only 17 years old. They see the future as up to them to build and they are not afraid to take it on.

Tune in and get inspired about what you can make happen in the future- no matter how old your country’s constitution is.