The blastoff Saturday night
will carry Fyodor Yurchikhin, Oleg Kotov and Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born billionaire
computer guru, to the International Space Station.
Simonyi's space journey
will take roughly 13 days, including 11 days on the orbiting station and travel
time to and from it.
Simonyi, 58, who is paying
about US$25 million (euro19 million) for the ride, returns to Earth on April 20
with the current occupants of the orbiting outpost, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail
Tyurin and U.S. astronaut Miguel Lopez-Alegria.
The third member of the
current crew, U.S.
astronaut Sunita Williams, remains on the station until June, when she will
be replaced by Clayton Anderson. Yurchikhin and Kotov will stay
in orbit for six months.
A locomotive slowly rolled
the 40-meter (130-foot) gray,
white and orange Soyuz booster out of a massive hangar and carefully towed
it on a train car toward a launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Russia's
facility for manned space missions that it leases from Kazakhstan.
Dozens of police with
bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the tracks, as the rocket was moved through bleak,
dusty fields, covered with rusty pieces of scrap metal and dotted with shabby
hangars, underlying the funding shortages the Russian space program has
experienced since the Soviet collapse.
Sending non-astronauts into
space, like Simonyi and four others before him, helps keep Russia's space
program running, said Sergei Krikalev, a veteran cosmonaut and deputy head of
RKK Energiya, the country's leading spacecraft manufacturer.
"Basically the system is trying
to make ends meet, and to make sure they meet we are forced to resort to
non-budget methods of financing, such as tourism,'' Krikalev told reporters as
the rocket was being erected at the launch pad.
Simonyi, a former Microsoft
executive who was born in Communist Hungary and moved to the United States in
1968, has been undergoing rigorous training before the flight. Even though
Simonyi has appeared calm and confident and space officials have said he was
fully prepared for the trip, Krikalev acknowledged the would-be space tourist
was feeling a bit nervous.
"He is prepared, but it is
understandable that he is getting more nervous before the launch, it is quite
natural,'' Krikalev said.
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