Bass misses out on his ride into space

A Russian rocket, in which US pop star Lance Bass was hoping for a ride, lifted off from a launch site in the steppe today, carrying two cosmonauts and a Belgian astronaut to the international space station for an eight-day mission.

The Soyuz FG rocket lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3.11am GMT as scheduled, said Nikolai Kryuchkov, a spokesman for Russia’s mission control centre outside Moscow.

The Soyuz TMA spacecraft with the crew aboard separated from the rocket and entered orbit successfully, Mr Kryuchkov said.

The flight had been originally scheduled for Monday but was postponed after an October 15 accident at the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Russia, where an unmanned Soyuz-U rocket blew up within seconds of liftoff. Space officials said this week that a foreign object was found in the rocket’s fuel line, and the investigation was continuing.

But Russian space officials gave the space station mission the final go-ahead yesterday, saying both the crew and their equipment were prepared for their mission. It is led by Captain Sergei Zaletin, along with Belgian first flight engineer Frank de Winne of the European Space Agency and second flight engineer Yuri Lonchakov.

Bass of the US band ’N Sync had hoped to be on the flight and trained at Russia’s cosmonaut centre this summer, but he was bumped from the crew after he failed to come up with the reported $20m (€20.3m) fare.

The Soyuz-TMA is to dock with the space station on Friday at 5am GMT, Mr Kryuchkov said. The crew is to carry out 23 scientific experiments including biomedical and weightlessness studies, the Interfax news agency reported.

The new Soyuz TMA spacecraft, which has a new control system and will be left behind at the station while they make their return on an older Soyuz TM capsule, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.