Amazing coincidence: Aussie housewife and cosmonaut
Every now and then you hear a true story that's just too, too remarkable.
An Australian woman, Maggie Iaquinto, from Colac, a country town in the state of Victoria, describes herself as a "housewife", but she also teaches at a technical college and is a whiz at ham radio. At the end of the 1980s as the Soviet Union was collapsing, she made radio contact with one of the Soviet cosmonauts on the MIR space station.
"Over a period of five years she spoke to 19 cosmonauts on ham radio and made history by establishing the first computer-to-computer civilian communication with a space station."
She formed a close online relationship with the one cosmonaut in particular, catching him for ten minutes a day as MIR flew over Colac, and later was invited to Houston to speak to an envious ham operators' club about her extraordinary experience. But that's not the amazing bit.
In 2004, also in Australia, unbeknown to Maggie was launched an opera that tells the story of a Soviet cosmonaut who, through radio contact with an Australian woman, learns about the fall of the USSR, and they fall in love. Apart from the falling in love part, the opera's story is an almost perfect match for what actually happened, though the opera's writers did not know about Maggie and the cosmonaut.
Maggie Iaquinto is an incredibly engaging interviewee and her story is one of the best I've heard for ages ... best of all because it's true.
This audio documentary is online here.
Every now and then you hear a true story that's just too, too remarkable.
An Australian woman, Maggie Iaquinto, from Colac, a country town in the state of Victoria, describes herself as a "housewife", but she also teaches at a technical college and is a whiz at ham radio. At the end of the 1980s as the Soviet Union was collapsing, she made radio contact with one of the Soviet cosmonauts on the MIR space station.
"Over a period of five years she spoke to 19 cosmonauts on ham radio and made history by establishing the first computer-to-computer civilian communication with a space station."
She formed a close online relationship with the one cosmonaut in particular, catching him for ten minutes a day as MIR flew over Colac, and later was invited to Houston to speak to an envious ham operators' club about her extraordinary experience. But that's not the amazing bit.
In 2004, also in Australia, unbeknown to Maggie was launched an opera that tells the story of a Soviet cosmonaut who, through radio contact with an Australian woman, learns about the fall of the USSR, and they fall in love. Apart from the falling in love part, the opera's story is an almost perfect match for what actually happened, though the opera's writers did not know about Maggie and the cosmonaut.
Maggie Iaquinto is an incredibly engaging interviewee and her story is one of the best I've heard for ages ... best of all because it's true.
This audio documentary is online here.
Pip Wilson posted item above at 2:43 PM | Permalink
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