U.S. astronaut thanks Russians for spaceflights

STAR CITY, Russia -- The American astronaut scheduled to fly to the International Space Station next week thanked Russia on Friday for continuing its space program after U.S. shuttle flights were suspended following the Columbia disaster.

"The only reason we can continue this program is because Russia has the capacity to launch Progress and Soyuz modules," Edward Lu said at Russia's Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow. "It's very important to show the world what we can do together."

Russia's government reversed policy this month, saying it would boost funding to build more spacecraft to compensate for the suspension of shuttle flights.

Russia previously said it could not fund such construction on its own.

Lu and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko are scheduled to blast off on a Soyuz space rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 26 and spend six months on the space station.

Russian rockets remain the only link to the station following the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts, and the indefinite grounding of all U.S. shuttles.

Lu, a physicist, and Malenchenko, a pilot and engineer, were scheduled to fly to the space station last month aboard the shuttle Atlantis.

"This flight has extra meaning. Our close friends did perish two months ago," Lu said. "But this doesn't mean we should stop what we're doing, stop at the first setback."

Lu and Malenchenko will replace the space station's current crew, U.S. astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, who have been in space since November. The three will return to Earth next month on an older Soyuz spaceship now serving as the station's lifeboat.

The United States and Russia are reducing the space station crew to two to limit the strain on supplies. Without the large shuttle payloads, only limited supplies can be delivered to the station on Russia's unmanned Progress cargo ships.

Andrei Maiboroda, spokesman for the cosmonaut training center, said assembly work on the station has been suspended and the crew would focus mainly on maintenance. Lu and Malenchenko also will conduct biological experiments, including tests on preventing bone loss in the zero-gravity environment of space.

"We'll be exercising a lot," Lu said.

Lu and Malenchenko flew to the space station in 2000, teaming up for a joint spacewalk to hook up exterior cables. Previously, Lu flew to Russia's Mir orbiter in 1997 and Malenchenko commanded a four-month mission on Mir in 1994.