The Kourou-cosmonaut connection

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

The head of the Russian Space Agency came to South America at the end of February, and brought some special rocks with him. That may have seemed a tad ironic, because the space project he had come to dedicate was being delayed because construction crews were encountering too many rocks.

But these were hindering excavation for a new launch pad. The rocks that the Russian brought with him were stepping stones to a future pathway.

The Russian official, Anatoliy Perminov, was at the European space launch center in Kourou, French Guyana. In a ceremony, a stone and memorial marker from Russia's very first space launch pad was placed at the future location of new pad in French Guyana.

Europe and Russia have spent a long time looking beyond the soon-to-be-retired U.S. space shuttle. Although this new launch pad for the 'Soyuz' booster rocket is justified on commercial space traffic alone, it has even wider potential. It may become the cornerstone for a joint all-European human orbital flight access, both to the mature space station and to other orbital facilities for research, commerce and even tourism.

The new launch pad is located a few miles east of Kourou, where European space projects — particular the Ariane commercial launch system — have been blasting off for decades. Based on a French-Russian agreement in 2003, construction has now begun in earnest on a pad capable of handling Russian 'Soyuz' boosters. The first orbital flight is expected in about two years.

Perminov attended a special ceremony on February 26 to kick off the formal assembly effort that will involve hundreds of local workers supplemented by more than 100 Russian construction engineers and crew.

As part of that ceremony, he emplaced the stone taken from the first Russian space launch pad at Baykonur in now-independent Kazakhstan in central Asia.

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Fifty years ago, that stone was washed by the flames of rockets that carried the first Sputniks, and a few years later, the first men into orbit. A plaque on the stone commemorates, in particular, the launching of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.

Although the purpose of the new launch pad is mutual profit through commercial payload delivery to space, Russian officials make no secret of their long-range goal for the facility. It is human space flight — more Gagarins, on Russian-European spacecraft — using a new access highway to space that bypasses existing political bottlenecks in Kazakhstan and in Florida.

"Yes, of course, over the long term, the 'Soyuz-ST' which will be launched from Kourou can be used also for manned launches," Perminov told reporters.

Igor Panarin, spokesman of the Russian space agency, said that human flights were possible in the future. He said that France had already raised the issue of using the Kourou spaceport for manned launches.

"It is possible that France and Russia will switch to a manned program," he said. "However, this is a matter for the coming decade."

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Joint development of an upgraded Russian Soyuz spacecraft is a fall-back position for Moscow's original desire for a new six-man space ferry. Foreign partners could not be found to fully fund that project, so the Russians proposed a more efficient and flexible variant of the basic spacecraft they have used for all cosmonaut missions over the past forty years, the three-seat Soyuz.

Human spacecraft from Kourou could, by the middle of the next decade, be ferrying crews to and from the international space station and to other inhabitable facilities deployed in other orbits for a wide range of commercial purposes, including tourism. The upgraded Soyuz is explicitly being designed for the rigors of lunar flight, as well. Those missions, too, might originate from the new South American launch pad.

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