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.