Russian Spaceship Rolled Out to Launch Pad

By KADYR TOKTOGULOV

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan – Engineers rolled a Russian spaceship out to the launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome Tuesday, taking the final steps to prepare for a crew’s upcoming mission to the international space station.

Workers moved the gray and white Soyuz-TMA8 on train rails from its assembly site only 48 hours before it will hurtle from the Central Asian steppe into space carrying Russian Pavel Vinogradov, American Geoffrey Williams and Brazil’s first astronaut, Marcos Cesar Pontes. The mission will include experiments designed to see how humans react to prolonged space travel.

"We can return to the moon and ultimately to Mars," said Kirk Shireman, NASA’s deputy manager for the space station as he described how the knowledge gleaned from the experiments would be used.

The American space program has depended on Russian Soyuz and Progress craft to ferry its astronauts and supplies to the orbiting space station since the 2003 Columbia disaster grounded the U.S. shuttle fleet. Though the shuttle Discovery visited the station in July, troubles with foam insulation on its external fuel tank have cast doubt on when the shuttle will fly again.

Shireman said the United States would continue to rely on Soyuz to make its twice-yearly missions to the space station, despite a shuttle flight scheduled for July.