Rocket hauled to launch pad for space station's first crew

by MARCIA DUNN
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAIKONUR, Kazakstan - The Russian rocket that will carry up the first residents of the international space station emerged from its hangar yesterday. and, enveloped by the pre-dawn desert fog, was hauled by rail to its launch pad.

The Soyuz rocket is American astronaut Bill Shepherd's ticket to the new space station. He's scheduled to depart on his four-month mission from Baikonur Cosmodrome on Tuesday, along with Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev.

Shepherd and his crew did not come out to watch their rocket's half-hour train ride across the barren steppes of this Central Asian spaceport 1,300 miles southeast of Moscow. Shepherd's wife was there, though, to videotape the event.

"It's hard to believe that we're here," said Beth Stringham-Shepherd. "We've waited soooo long."

Yesterday, Shepherd, a 51-year-old Navy captain, will become only the second American to ride a Russian rocket to orbit. Two days later, he is scheduled to arrive at the international space station and become its first commander.

He has been training - and waiting - for this moment for almost five years. Russia's delays in building and then launching the space station's living quarters held everything up for more than two years.

"He's like, 'Let's just wrap this up and go,' " his wife said with a laugh.

By the time the space station is completed in 2006, it should be a first-class laboratory staffed by crews of up to seven. NASA envisions another full decade of operation beyond that.

Yesterday, the green, white and orange rocket, 168 feet from tip to tip, was transported horizontally atop a train car pulled by a diesel engine. Its destination was 1 1/2 miles away - the launch pad where the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, took off in 1957 and where the world's first spaceman, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, departed in 1961.