By John Holliman

In this story:

(CNN) -- I'm at the Johnson Space Center in Houston this week. I'm meeting some of the new astronauts who have been in training for two years for their first missions. I'm also getting to look closely at the new space suits that will be used by crews building the new International Space Station. Make sure to watch after I get back home for some wonderful stories about what it takes to become an astronaut and what you have to do after you get the job to get onto a shuttle crew.

There may be more delays in building the new space station. Nobody is confirming it officially, but some at NASA are concerned that problems with the lack of a budget for the Russian Space Agency could force the space station partners to delay the first pieces of station equipment until this time next year. Long-time readers of the View from Space will remember we talked about a six-month delay earlier which turned into the currently announced launch schedule.

By the way, I'm sharing a hotel near the JSC with half a dozen cosmonauts who are training here for space station duty. So far, my awful Russian and their not-yet-perfect English have prevented lots of communication, but I'll try to get their views of the Russian space budget problems and share with you here.

SOHO phones home

Remember the SOHO satellite that's been parked a million miles from Earth, looking at the sun? It dropped out of touch with its controllers on Earth, but over the past few days, the satellite has been able to respond to some commands from the ground. It appears to analysts that one of SOHO's two main batteries has lost power, and engineers are trying to get it to recharge. If SOHO is not fixed, then we'll lose advance warning of some solar storms and a valuable tool to take a close look at this planet's main energy source.

Sen. John Glenn and members of his shuttle crew have been at the Kennedy Space Center this week continuing their daily training for the mission of shuttle Discovery October 29. Soon, you should be seeing the texts of extensive interviews conducted with Glenn and many others by a documentary production team which will deliver two hour-long documentaries on Glenn and his shuttle mission. The first one will be broadcast the week before the launch, the other after STS-95, the Glenn mission, returns to Earth.

New Mir crew in place

The new crew of cosmonauts launched to the Mir space station last week has gotten there safely. The three-person crew docked with Mir on Saturday. The automatic docking system failed in the final minutes of approach, and the Soyuz commander, and now Mir commander, Gennady Padalka, was able to dock manually with no trouble.

This new crew includes Yuri Baturin, former security adviser to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and engineer Sergei Avdeyev. The plan is for Baturin to live on Mir for about two weeks, then return to Earth with the departing crew. The other two cosmonauts are planning to live on Mir until February, but flight engineer Avdeyev may remain on the station until it's abandoned next summer.

John Holliman's column appears on Wednesdays.