Last saturday, I went to Le Bourget, Paris, (by car) for an evening commemorating Apollo 17 and also about tourism in space.
Arriving at the entry of the museum, I see a group of people and start a conversation.
An elderly person notices I seem to know lots of things and tells me he's Jean-Pierre Haigneré's father, which also means he's Claudie's father in-law. We must have talked for about 20 or 30 minutes!
He told me several "secrets" like the fact that 10 seconds before Jean-Pierre's first liftoff, there was a sudden electrical shortage at the base and the secundary unit started to work just before it was time to leave the ground and the rocket left the ground one second late!
(Nobody believes NASA would have let the Shuttle starting its engines had this happened at the KSC).
Dad Haigneré also told me that Jean-Pierre really felt very unconfortable (even frightened) when he went out the Mir hatch for his EVA: it occured in the night side of the orbit and he couldn't see anything at all but pitch black sky, nothing but black!! Very oppressing (This was caused by a strongly lighted up airlock he had just left).
Mr Haigneré father is the one holding the microphone at the middle of my webpage about the event (Jean-Pierre looks at him from behind).

One big puzzle: how come it's possible for us to order video cassettes of NASA flights (even though NASA isn't a commercial company) and totally impossible for us to order videos of ESA flights? (Mr Haigneré did have videos of all his son's and daughter in-law's flights, but he's privileged....

Well, the great thing about this conference evening was that it was possible to get close to people we usually read about in scientific or space magazines! (We were merely 30 or so)

Raoul