TIM FURNISS/LONDON
The three-man Soyuz mission to the Mir space station on 13 August is being launched on credit worth $33 million after a Russian Government pledge to provide $120 million to Energia failed to materialise, says the company's director general Yuri Semenov.
The space station's remaining time in orbit will be funded mainly from sources outside the state budget, such as selling 13% of the Energia company, Semenov says.
Soyuz TM28 will be launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with commander Gennadi Padalko, flight engineer Sergei Avdeyev and cosmonaut researcher Yuri Butarin, the former aide to president Boris Yeltsin. Butarin will return with the resident TM27 crew, Talgat Musabayev and Nikolai Budarin on 25 August.
The TM28 crew will begin the process of lowering the Mir's orbit from 450km to 330km. The operation will be continued using two unmanned Progress M tankers in October and in 1999.
The tentative plan would see the TM29 being launched on 22 February carrying a commander and French and Slovak cosmonauts making commercial flights. Padalko will return with the Slovak, while the TM29 commander, Avdeyev and the Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Haignere, will remain to complete the de-orbiting of the Mir in June 1999, leaving five days before the Mir's final controlled dive over the Atlantic Ocean.
The cash-strapped Russian Space Agency (RSA) has released a tender for live television coverage of the launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome of the Zarya control module for the International Space Station aboard a Proton booster on 20 November.
The RSA says that Russian and foreign TV companies will be invited to tender. The winner will have the exclusive rights to live coverage of the launch. One of the conditions is that a live relay should be broadcast from Baikonur to NASA via the Russian flight control centre in Moscow. Selection is expected by 1 September.
Source: Flight International
