PARIS -- Veteran European astronaut
Thomas Reiter will spend six or seven months at the international space station
starting this summer following a contractual agreement between the Russian and
European space agencies and the approval of NASA, which will carry Reiter to
and from the orbital complex aboard the U.S. space shuttle, European and
Russian officials said.
Reiter's mission -- the first for a
German national aboard the international space station -- was approved following
negotiations between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal
Space Agency, Roskosmos.
Under the agreement, ESA is paying
some 20 million euros ($26 million) in cash to Roskosmos,
and will provide room for Russian station equipment aboard ESA's
Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) space tug, scheduled to make regular visits to
the station starting in 2006. The total value of the contract, including the
ATV-related services, is about 30 million euros.
While on board, Reiter's formal
status will be that of a Russian cosmonaut, and it is under that heading that
he has been approved for launch aboard a U.S. space shuttle tentatively
scheduled for launch in July. The launch date will depend heavily on when the
shuttle makes its return to flight after the February 2003 Columbia failure.
NASA and Roskosmos
have an agreement that cover launches of Russian cosmonauts to the station. Russia is using
this agreement to place Reiter aboard the shuttle.
Michel Tognini,
head of ESA's astronaut corps, based in Cologne, Germany,
said ESA has been negotiating for a long-duration flight since early 2004. The
agency has organized several so-called "taxi" flights of its astronauts to the
station, but these are less than two weeks in duration -- insufficient for many
of the experiments ESA wants to conduct, Tognini said
April 28.
ESA's Columbus space station laboratory is several
years behind schedule, due in part to the grounding of the shuttle, and will
not be launched before late 2006 or 2007. The agency in the meantime has been
searching for ways to give its ground teams and astronauts the kind of work
they will need to perform once Columbus
is operational.
Tognini also said Reiter's presence as the
third astronaut aboard the station for six months once the shuttle leaves will
double the amount of experiments that a two-person crew could conduct.
"The amount of maintenance
astronauts need to perform on the station means that there is not enough
science being done if only two are there," Tognini
said. "When you add a third person, you double the science you can do. Reiter's
presence will be highly appreciated by all the space station partners."
Tognini said Reiter will conduct a science
program designed mainly by Russian teams. But he also will perform a suite of
ESA experiments.
Reiter spent 179 days in orbit in
1995 aboard Russia's
Mir space station, then flying as an ESA astronaut.
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