Russians could ferry crew to space station

A Russian space official today said US manned space flights could be grounded indefinitely following the loss of the shuttle Columbia and suggested that Russian Soyuz rockets should be used to ferry crews back and forth to the International Space Station, a news agency reported.

“It’s absolutely obvious that shuttle flights will be stopped, possibly for some years, until the final determination of the cause of the Columbia accident,” said Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for the Russian Space Agency, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.