Survival Training in Kazakh Steppe to Precede Space Flights

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan. June 23 (Interfax-Kazakhstan) – Trainee cosmonauts will arrive at the Baikonur space center from Russia early next month for a survival training session in which they will be settled for several days in a camp to be set up in a nearby steppe, a Russian space source said on Wednesday.

The trainees, who are taking courses at the Russian Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, near Moscow, will have to learn to “stay alive and healthy” in the event of an emergency landing, the source in the Russian Federal Space Center at Baikonur told Interfax.

He said this would be the first training course of its kind.

The group will include Kazakh trainee cosmonauts Mukhtar Aimakhanov and Aidyn Aimbetov, who began a two-year training course at the Gagarin Center in June 2003.