MIRNEWS.124 7 MARCH 1992 NEW CREWS ON BAYKONUR: The crew of Soyuz-TM14 and the stand-ins are now in Baykonur for their final training. The crew on board MIR received the news about the relief crews with pleasure. They did all what they had to do, kept good hearth, but the turbulent events in their country during the last months did not always stimulate their good mood and they want to return to earth as soon as possible. (Launch S-TM14 on March the 17th, docking to MIR 2 days later and return of Volkov, Krikalyov and Flade (or: Ewald) on 25 March with Soyuz-TM13). R.K.A. (Rossiyskoye Kosmicheskoye Agentstvo): Yeltsin signed a decree for the establishment of this new organisation. It can be compared with the U.S. NASA and has to reorganize all institutions, involved in Russian space exploration. Yeltsin appointed Yuriy Nikolayevich Koptev as head of the R.K.A. Koptev began his carreer as a junior engineer of NPO Lavochkin and until spring 1991 he was Minister for General Machineconstruction of the former S.U. In that quality he also acted as a member of the statecommittee for sovjet space exploration, which was always responsible for the selection of crews for manned space flights. The RKA will start with a small staff of 150 persons (In NASA's headquarters work 1500 persons). TEMPORARY CLOSURE OF THIS STATION: Our trip to the CIS to cover the Russian-German space mission MIR92 on the spot, will cause an interruption of the normal information stream. During my absence my colleague Peter will try to record as much radiotraffic as possible. Information to be derived from those recordings after return in combination with that what we will gather in the CIS might enable us to draft some interesting reports about the events during that 'silence period'. Chris v.d. Berg, NL-9165/A-UK3202.