Space tourist mission ready to blast off for ISS
(7)
Updated: 2002-04-25 11:12

Space

Three astronauts, including fee-paying South African Internet millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, were preparing on Thursday to take their seats in a Russian rocket for a nine-minute blast into orbit.

Shuttleworth, 28, is the second amateur cosmonaut to pay his way into space after US businessman Dennis Tito visited the International Space Station (ISS) a year ago. He is the first African citizen ever to go into space.

Crammed into the cockpit by his side will be Russian Yuri Gidzenko and Italian pilot Roberto Vittori.

The crew, whose Soyuz-TM34 craft is due to blast off at 12:26 p.m. local time (2:26 a.m. EDT), will spend eight days on the ISS before landing back on the Kazakhstan steppe on May 5.

"They are feeling great, full of energy," the head of the International Commission for Soyuz Launches, Valery Alaverdov said. "We have given them our approval and the go-ahead to carry on with the final preparations."

After a day of medical tests and technical preparations, the cosmonauts watched the classic 1970s Soviet blockbuster "The Scorching Sun of the Desert" in a decades-old tradition faithfully followed by every crew leaving Baikonur.

"We received our final ballistic and trajectory information, and we have been working closely with the doctors, who have been keeping a beady eye on us," Shuttleworth said on Wednesday.

"And we are trying to prepare ourselves, psychologically." While the cosmonauts sleep ahead of the launch, work on the 160-foot, 300-ton Soyuz booster rocket will continue at the Baikonur cosmodrome which Russia rents from Kazakhstan.

Technicians will begin fueling the rocket four hours before the blast-off, and the crew themselves will board it two hours ahead, walking down the same path to Launch Pad One as the world's first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, did in April 1961.

SPACE BUFF

Shuttleworth will be the second amateur space buff to buy a reported US$20 million ticket to the ISS, but his eight-month training stint at Star City outside Moscow suffered little of the US-Russian controversy that tinted Tito's flight.

NASA feared that Tito, who was first scheduled to visit the now-defunct Mir station, might endanger himself and the ISS.

Russia's Rosaviakosmos space agency accused NASA of stalling preparations because it objected to cash-paying amateurs visiting the $95 billion space outpost.

But the injections of funds by both Tito and Shuttleworth are vital to Russia's cash-starved space program. The price tag on a single tourist seat amounts to a huge slice of the meager budget, and almost covers the cost of a Soyuz launch.

And Shuttleworth, who has a range of scientific experiments to carry out on board, including HIV /AIDS and genetics tests, is considered by many on both the Russian and the US side of the ISS to be "an amateur, passive passenger only in name."

Former President Nelson Mandela led South Africans on Wednesday in cheering on Shuttleworth, saying that he would be carrying out important experiments for the country's scientists.

Initially criticized at home for spending a fortune on a personal lark, Shuttleworth has won over most South Africans and a skeptical press with his First African in Space project, despite the fact that he now lives in London.

Italian Vittori, 37, a European Space Agency astronaut who will fly as the crew's flight engineer, will also be on his maiden flight.

Gidzenko, 40, who will captain the flight, was one of the three-strong crew that blazed the ISS trail in October 2000. He has logged almost a year's worth of days in space, and over three hours of space walks.

After blast off, the crew will fly for less than nine minutes before breaking out of the earth's gravity, but will take almost two days to dock with the 16-nation ISS.

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