Flying cosmonaut animated loop

This is a scene I made for CG Society's Challenge based on Greg Bear's EON novel. It depicts one of the book's characters (MIrsky) flying up a meteor wall passing fellow cosmonauts along the way. I purchased an astronaut/cosmonaut model here and then modeled out the rocket pack using corelDRAW 12 and Lightwave. I drafted the jet pack in corel draw and extruded and beveled the data in Lightwave. It originally had a crane on the wing but I decided to delete it in the final render. Here is the corelDRAW illustration.

I imported the Corel data into Lightwave and modeled the wing along with the pack. Here is the Lightwave render.

I then took the head off of a Poser model and placed it into the cosmonaut helmet. Lens flares along with volumetric lights were made in Lightwave and the whole scene was composited in Aftereffects. The little thrust emitting from the jet pack is a Lightwave volumetric light render with an Aftereffects position.wiggle expression applied to it. Note the heavy depth of field applied and rendered directly out of Lightwave using the highest anti aliasing settings possible. A small subtle area light could have filled in the very darkest spots in the middle of the cosmonaut there... Ah well.... Next time.

The final is 1280 by 500 at 24 frames per second. Here is a compressed 720 by 281 24 fps version.

I had to remodel parts of the hands and middle section of the cosmonaut to make it work for my scene. The background (hard to see in this compressed sample) was a displacement map with motion and blur applied to it. The final animation is in .swf format.
Software used: corelDRAW, Lightwave, Aftereffects, Photoshop, Poser and Flash.
You can see a high definition version of this animated loop right over here. Thanks!