Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 15, 1995 TAG: 9503150052
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: BAIKONUR COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN LENGTH: Medium
``I never thought I'd ever see the day when an American was launched in a Russian rocket,'' said Dave Leestma, head of NASA's flight crew operations, after watching the Soyuz rocket, carrying U.S. astronaut Norman Thagard and two Russian cosmonauts, rumble into flight Tuesday morning exactly on schedule.
Yuri Koptev, head of the Russian Space Agency, said Tuesday's flight heralded a new cooperative era in space. ``I am absolutely happy,'' he said, as he joined Thagard's family and a NASA delegation at a frigid outdoor viewing stand about a mile from the Soyuz launch pad. The temperature at liftoff - decidedly unlike the norm at Cape Canaveral - was about 3 degrees above zero.
Cheers went up from the crowd, with some waving American flags, and champagne was passed around among some Russians as Thagard, 51, flight commander Vladimir Dezhurov, 32, and flight engineer Gennady Strekalov, 54, soared into space, trailing a plume of engine flames, at 1:11 a.m. EST.
The launch appeared to go off without a hitch, although Russia's Tass news agency reported that a fire broke out on the launch pad as flames from the rocket's booster engines were spread by strong, gusting winds. The agency reported only minor damage to the pad.
The three men are scheduled to dock Thursday morning with the Russian space station, Mir, and then will begin a 90-day stay in Mir before being ferried back to Earth on the U.S. shuttle Atlantis.
This flight and Atlantis' planned docking at Mir in mid-June - another first - are the opening moves in an unprecedented effort to meld two formerly competitive and antagonistic space programs into a joint effort to replace Mir, now nine years old, with a new international space station by 2002.
The cooperation is breathing new life into the cash-strapped Russian space program, which will receive $400 million from the United States. It will provide U.S. astronauts with access to the permanently manned Mir, a relatively inexpensive and quick way for the United States to get experience in long-duration space flight. Over the next few years, up to seven shuttle missions will dock with Mir, ferrying crews back and forth to Earth.
As he and his colleagues donned spacesuits Tuesday morning, Thagard told his wife and three sons through the wall of his isolation room that he wasn't nervous at all.
``Love ya,'' he said, before the three men boarded the bus that took them to the Soyuz launch pad. This is the same spot from which, more than three decades earlier, Russia had opened the era of space competition by launching the first satellite - Sputnik - and the first man in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
by CNB