I was going to mention Don - he's a friend of a friend - and the book he's writing about the Russian Venus program. There's a lot of awesome stuff here that almost no-one knows about.
His series of pages on the Venera program[1] just blows all other resources away, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
He mentions on his copyright page[2] that he studied Russian books/papers, befriended & interviewed Russian scientists, dug up rare photographs, and even processed original spacecraft data with custom C++ code to create some of the images!
I look forward to his book; does he have an ETA on the publication date?
All his friends are pestering him about when he's releasing this book - he's under no pressure to publish and rather enjoys the process of digging up all this stuff and writing the code to process these images.
