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BAIKONUR, Kazakh – Two Slavonic cosmonauts making their prototypal flights into expanse said Sun they are counting on their U.S. crewmate when the threesome blast off unitedly for the International Space Station.

American Ron Garan logged 13 life in expanse on a expanse shuttle mission in 2008, which makes him the most old member of the crew. At 49 he is also the oldest.

Garan and Slavonic cosmonauts Andrei Borisenko, 46, and herb Samokutyayev, 40, module ride into expanse on a Slavonic Soyuz to be launched early Tuesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They are expected to accomplish the orbiting beam digit life later.

"We've got Ron who's got this undergo and he promised to support us with some issues and the feelings that we might connexion and that cannot be shapely on earth," Samokutyayev told reporters.

The start is just a hebdomad shy of the 50th day of Yuri Gagarin's past travelling into expanse as the prototypal manlike in space. Tuesday's start is from the aforementioned start pad.

This mission's Soyuz TMA-21 was named after spaceman and carries his portrait — a thin abstract for Slavonic expanse craft, which are normally plain in their design, carrying null but the ship's name and number.

In line with a today 50-year tradition, the gathering early this hebdomad visited the cabin where spaceman spent his terminal period before his flight.

Garan said he got "a lowercase bit of chills" when he visited the cabin, where every the furnishings and even Gagarin's individualized possession hit been kept intact.

The U.S. traveler stressed how such has changed since Gagarin's grace in 1961 during the expanse race between the digit Cold War superpowers.

"Fifty eld ago, digit commonwealth launched digit man, essentially as a competition," he said. "Today, the threesome of us equal the some nations of the planetary partnership that makes up the International Space Station."

Sergei Krikalyov, who heads Russia's Cosmonauts Training Center, acknowledged opinion "a lowercase nervous" most the digit Russians having no expanse grace experience.

"We've been disagreeable to beam an old cosmonaut and an fledgling digit at the aforementioned time, but we're today having more flights and we're streaming out of cosmonauts," he told The Associated Press. "We requirement to provide younger people a quantity to fly."

Krikalyov, who holds the record for instance in expanse of 803 days, noted that the underway three-man gathering module be on their possess only during the two-day grace to the International Space Station. Once there, they module join Russia's Dmitry Kondratyev, NASA traveler Empress Coleman and Italy's Paolo Nespoli.

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