REGINALD TURNILL, 85 next month, is the world's oldest working space correspondent. When Senator John Glenn, then 77, made his second spaceflight in November 1998, he told Turnill: "I admire you for still working and I hope I'm still working when I'm 83".

Turnill was the BBC Aerospace correspondent when the space race began, and rushed between Moscow and Cape Canaveral to cover the first spaceflights of Yuri Gagarin, Alan Shepard, Gherman Titov and John Glenn.

åFrom then on he commuted between London, Cape Canaveral (briefly known as Cape Kennedy at that time) and Houston to cover every manned American spaceflight, right through the moonlandings, and on to the Shuttle flights when they took over in 1981.

In addition to his BBC reporting, Turnill has written many articles and books, and created Jane's Spaceflight Directory, writing the whole of the first four editions. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the British Interplanetary Society.