A look at noteworthy addresses in the Southland.

Space shuttle astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz spoke last week at Claremont McKenna College on the future of United States-Russian cooperation in space research and the astronaut program. From his remarks: On the Upcoming U.S.-Russian Space Shuttle Mission “The flight (in November) with the Russians is highly focused on life sciences and microgravity. . . . The Russians have a lot of expertise in long-duration flights. They’ve been up there for about a year at a time and so they’ve got a pretty respectable space station.

The United States, on the other hand, has developed extremely sophisticated technologies . . . the shuttle is quite a remarkable machine with a lot of flexibility. So the two programs have evolved through separate paths, but complementary in many ways.

We always wanted a space station; the Russians have one. The Russians don’t have an operational shuttle, and we do. So it does make sense to cooperate.

On the 1992 Atlantis Mission

“We had a chance to see a lot of the Earth . . . some of the forest fires that are created seasonally in the Amazon basin, some of the greatest ecological disasters that we’ve ever seen. All the deforestation taking place in the Amazon basin. All those patches of cleared forest for miles and miles . . . those patterns are one of the saddest things that we can witness from space.”

On What the Future Holds

“The mission to Mars, your son may be on that flight, perhaps my daughter might even do that. . . . The astronaut office has a tremendous variety of people. We have a lot of medical people, biologists, physicists, astronomers, oceanographers, geologists, engineers. We have the entire spectrum of science and technology.”

Announcements concerning prominent speakers in Los Angeles should be sent to Speaking Up, c/o Times researcher Nona Yates, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053