The price of a commercial flight to the International Space Station has risen from $20 million to $21 million, a Russian space official is quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying.
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November 10, 2006A Russian cargo ship docked successfully with the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday after overcoming a problem that had prevented the craft from hooking up firmly with the orbiting outpost, space officials at the Mission Control is quoted by Xinhua news agency.
The Progress M-58 ship initially docked at the station at 18:28 Moscow time (1428 GMT), but the operation was hindered from being completed because an antenna failed to fold as required during docking, Russian news agencies reported.
After three hours of troubleshooting, the docking operation was completed, space officials said.
“During the second attempt, the metal bar bringing the spacecraft and the ISS together advanced completely and electrical connectors connected successfully,†a Mission Control official was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
The Progress M-58 blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday with more than 2.5 tons of supplies for the ISS crew, including food, water, fuel, equipment and parcels from families of the ISS astronauts.
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October 27, 2006Soyuz spacecraft to bring the next space tourist to the international space station (ISS) in March, the Associated Press reported.
Charles Simonyi, a native of Hungary who made his fortune in computer software, is set to visit the international space station on March 9, according to Space Adventures, which arranged the trip through Russia’s space agency.
Simonyi would be the fifth space tourist to pay the Virginia-based company an estimated $US20 million ($A26.23 million) to $US25 million ($A32.8 million) for the privilege.
The most recent, Texas businesswoman Anousheh Ansari, returned to Earth last month after a 10-day trip.
Simonyi is training for the eight-day trip in Star City, Russia.
Simonyi was born in Budapest and earned a doctorate in computer science at Stanford University.
He worked at Xerox Corp, then Microsoft Corp, where he helped design the popular Word and Excel programs, before founding his own software engineering company.
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An unmanned Russian cargo ship carrying 2.76 U.S. tons of supplies, equipment and gifts blasted off Monday en route to the international space station, a space official quoted by AP said.
The Progress M-58 mounted atop a Soyuz-U booster rocket lifted off at 5:41 p.m. from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and entered orbit about 10 minutes later, Federal Space Agency spokesman Valery Lyndin said.
The ship was scheduled to reach the orbiting station Thursday evening, delivering fresh fruit and vegetables, compact discs and DVDs and other gifts to the station’s current crew — cosmonaut
Mikhail Tyurin, U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and German astronaut Thomas Reiter.
Also included in the shipment, according to Itar-Tass, will be equipment for repairing a Russian-built Elektron oxygen generator, which overheated last month, spreading burnt-rubber smell and leaking potassium hydroxide.
While the incident forced the crew to don masks and gloves in the first emergency ever declared aboard the 8-year-old orbiting outpost, Russian and U.S. space officials downplayed it, saying crew members’ lives were never in any danger.
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October 24, 2006NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency have named two astronauts and two cosmonauts to the next International Space Station crew.
Astronauts Clayton Anderson and Daniel Tani will travel to the station next year and work as flight engineers. Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov will spend six months aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Anderson will journey to the station aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-118 mission, targeted for launch next June. He will return to Earth on shuttle Atlantis during mission STS-120. That flight will carry his replacement, Tani, to the station. Tani will return on shuttle mission STS-122, scheduled for October 2007.
NASA said Yurchikhin will command Expedition 15, and Kotov will serve as station flight engineer and Soyuz commander. Yurchikhin and Kotov will fly to the complex aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to launch in March. Until Anderson arrives, astronaut Sunita Williams will serve as Expedition 15’s third crew member and flight engineer. She will fly to the station on STS-116 in December.
The Expedition 15 backup crew members are astronaut Gregory Chamitoff for Anderson, Sandra Magnus for Tani, and Russian cosmonauts Roman Romanenko and Mikhail Kornienko for Yurchikhin and Kotov.
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October 19, 2006
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