Last manned mission to ISS in 2011 planned for December 21
ZVEZDNY GORODOK. October 19. KAZINFORM The last manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011 is scheduled for December 21, head of the Agency's manned programs Alexei Krasnov said at the opening of the Space Forum 2011 on Tuesday; Kazinform refers to Itar-Tass.
Initially, the launch was due on December 26 but some ISS partners said they were unwilling to celebrate Christmas at the Baikonur spaceport, he said. "So, we hope for the soonest launch. Everything will depend on the readiness of the Soyuz engines," he said.
The task is not easy because Baikonur has a tight schedule of space launches in December 2011. "The Federal Space Agency will have to fit the Soyuz launch with the 30th/31st expeditions to the ISS into the tight schedule. Manned missions always have a priority," Krasnov said.
Soyuz TMA-03M will take aboard Oleg Kononenko of Russia, Donald Pettit of NASA and Andrei Kuipers of the European Space Agency (ESA).
The Federal Space Agency aims to provide the functioning of the ISS until 2028, Krasnov said.
"The partners have decided that the ISS will operate longer than it was planned initially [until 2015], no less than until 2020," he said. "The Federal Space Agency has the goal of extending the ISS operation to 30 years, until 2028."
The ISS will be used both as a unique research laboratory and an assembly dock. It may assemble spaceships, which will start their missions from the Earth orbit and return either to the Earth or to the circumterrestrial space. "All we have to do is to choose our destinations," Krasnov said.
The ISS project partners "will agree to a common vision of the development of manned space programs and goals of international cooperation in space," he said.
NASA astronaut Mark Polansky said that mankind had stayed on low orbits for too long and would now move farther, to other planets. In his words, NASA closed the space shuttle program for reaching the far space. It attaches large importance to the ISS project, primarily the new knowledge vital for far space travels, so NASA will meet its ISS commitments until 2020, Polansky said.
Martin Zell, the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) Research Operations Department, said that the ISS project was of huge importance to the agency; Kazinform cites Itar-Tass.
To learn more go to www.itar-tass.com/en/