Turkey Pushed for Its Own Astronaut on Space Shuttle

In exchange for buying Boeing jets, Turkey wanted a Turkish astronaut to fly on a NASA space shuttle, according to a classified U.S. State Department message recently released by the organization WikiLeaks. The leaked cable, published by the New York Times, was written in January 2010 by James Jeffrey while he was U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Jeffrey (now ambassador to Iraq) was apparently urging Turkish Airlines, which is partly owned by the Turkish government, to purchase planes from Boeing rather than its European competitor Airbus. More

(Source: Space.com - Jan 6)