With the scheduled retirement of the shuttle fast approaching, and the questionable ability of the United States to launch astronauts anytime soon after, Europe is looking toward Russia.
The Soyuz spacecraft, in operation since 1967, may soon be the only real alternative for European astronauts to get in to space. And, to ensure the accessibility to [...]

Guy Laliberte was once a street performer. Now, the Canadian billionaire and owner of the Cirque du Soleil is planning a trip into space
. He’ll be the world’s seventh space “tourist” when he’s launched aboard a Soyuz in September. He’ll be visiting the International Space Station.
During his 12 to 13 day mission, Laliberte plans to [...]

Original Mercury astronauts flew solo flights. The early Soviet cosmonauts also went into space alone. Then, after the fatal Soyuz flight of Vladimir Komarov, single passenger flights came to a halt.
Bigger spacecraft, bigger crews
NASA’s Gemini was a two-man spacecraft. Apollo carried three. And Soyuz, after Soyuz 1, normally carried three cosmonauts.
Still, others were alone in space. [...]

Americans are used to seeing their launches live on TV. In fact, after decades of shuttle launches, we see them less frequently live on TV…because they’re not rare or unusual.
The Russian Soyuz launches are common too. But seeing those launches live is still pretty rare. This month will be different. The launch of the next [...]

Business Week writes about the symbiotic relationship between Russia and the U.S. in space exploration. It re-iterates the biggest upcoming situation—that for five years or more, the U.S. will depend on Russia to get its astronauts into space. After the shuttle retires, only the Russian Soyuz will be available to ferry people to the International [...]

With the retirement of the space shuttle scheduled for next year, this group of astronauts will probably be going into space on a Russian Soyuz…at least for the next five years or so. The American replacement for the shuttle, Constellation, is still under development and will be for some time.
Astronaut candidates still plentiful
Even so, NASA [...]

When the Soviet N1 rocket failed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that ended any hope of getting Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov to the moon. They’d hoped to beat the Americans in the race to the moon…but failed to get there ever. Even as a runner up.
Even now, for a price tag of $100 million, [...]

Despite claims that the current space tourist, Charles Simonyi, would be the last one for years, there may be another paid space traveler as soon as September.
That’s the word from Space Adventures, the company which handles orbital flight to the International Space Station via the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Had been selling “empty” seats
Until now, Space Adventures [...]

At least it’s not the stock market. With today’s landing of the shuttle Discovery, seven of the thirteen people who were in space are no longer there.
Record space population
In other words, there were thirteen people in space before the landing (the most ever at the same time), and now it’s down to six. Before the [...]

The media have been describing it as raising serious questions about the reliability of the Soyuz spacecraft, but I consider today’s manual docking with the International Space Station to be a triumph.
There was, indeed, a problem. The automatic docking system failed, and an actual human being—a cosmonaut—performed a successful docking manually.
Man and machine
To me, that’s [...]