Armed police and two fire engines accompanied the rocket along its slow two-hour journey. A sniffer dog ran ahead of the train checking the track for explosives.
"It's beautiful like a sleeping woman," said Petr Kalinin, the chief neurologist of the Central Aviation Military Hospital in Moscow, who came to Baikonur to see the launch. "You've got to see it when it wakes up. Nobody else has anything like this," he said watching the rocket pass by.
A military helicopter circled above as the rocket was hoisted into position at the Baikonur cosmodrome, Russia's launch site for manned space missions in the dusty steppes of western Kazakhstan.
The Russian spacecraft with Russian Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, American astronaut Michael Fincke and Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers aboard will be lifted into space on Monday by a Soyuz-FG rocket, the third manned mission there since the February 2003 Columbia disaster halted NASA's shuttle program.
The Soyuz spacecraft can take aboard only three astronauts at a time and has very limited cargo capacity -- factors that have slowed the assembly of the space station which needs more crew and more cargo to be completed.
NASA spokesman Rob Navias said Saturday at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome that the resumption of shuttle flights was ``still some time away" and might happen "by this time next year."
But he added that "Soyuz will still be an important part of how we send crews up and down."
The task of keeping the international space station manned, has forced Russia to put on hold construction of its own segment of the space station and some commercial projects.
Looking for ways to ease the burden, the cash-strapped Russian space agency has suggested that if the United States shared the cost of launches it could deliver more cargo and men to the station.
But Navias said NASA was not prepared to discuss the proposal.
Russia has also proposed to extend a crew mission on the space station from six months to one year to free hands to give rides to well-paying space tourists, Sergei Gorbunov, chief spokesman for the Russian space agency, said Saturday.
Gorbunov said that despite the recent improvement of government funding, due to President Vladimir Putin's ``close attention'' to the space industry, it was still on a tight ration. ``We have nowhere to take money from."
Navias said NASA "was evaluating the request."
"The unique thing is that Russia has been up to every obligation that we've asked them for,'' he said, adding that NASA's decision would come within the next few weeks and it would do ``the right thing" for the international station and astronauts.
The grounding of the shuttle has also slowed down programs of the European Space Agency, which has no own means to fly manned missions.
"We are in a difficult position," Michel Tognini, chief of the squad of European astronauts, said in Baikonur.
The ESA needs the shuttle to deliver its scientific module Columbus, the most complex of the planned modules, to the international space station.
Padalka and Fincke, who were initially trained to fly on a U.S. shuttle, will spend 183 days on the space station. Kuipers will return after nine days with the station's current crew, U.S. astronaut Michael Foale and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri, who have been working there since October.
advertisement
