RUSSIA: A Russian Soyuz rocket docked with the International Space Station yesterday, delivering an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to the $95 billion orbiter in the first manned space flight since the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in February. Daniel McLaughlin reports from Moscow.
A live link-up between mission control outside Moscow and the space station, floating 400 km above Russia, showed Yuri Malenchenko and Edward Lu floating through a hatch to join the two Americans and one Russian who have been on the space station since last November.
"The whole world was watching you," Mr Yuri Semyonov, the head of Russian rocket-builder Energiya, told the new arrivals after they docked.
"It was a very important phase. We wish you success on this difficult mission. We are confident that you will be successful."
It was a moment of palpable relief for the US and Russian scientists who prepared the Soyuz in record time to fill in for the shuttle Atlantis, which is grounded pending an investigation into why Columbia broke up on re- entry to Earth's atmosphere on February 1st, killing the seven astronauts.
The space station's current crew - Americans Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian Nikolai Budarin - will return to Earth on May 3rd.
Having been due to return on Atlantis, they will now fly home in a Soyuz craft which was already docked with the space station, leaving the rocket which arrived yesterday to serve as an emergency escape vessel.
The loss of Columbia and subsequent suspension of all shuttle flights has placed a huge financial strain on Russia's space programme.
Washington has refused Moscow's requests for extra cash to build more rockets, citing a law which bars additional funding for Russia while it shares nuclear energy know-how with Iran, a country which President Bush calls part of an "axis of evil".
Reuters adds: The US space agency NASA yesterday launched a sky-mapping satellite, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The spacecraft is equipped with a telescope which records in the near- and far-ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The telescope is sensitive enough to pick up ultraviolet transmissions from galaxies 10 billion light years away.