| ||
| ||
| ||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Cosmonaut enjoys shower, married life
STAR CITY, Russia (Reuters) -- A hot shower and a new wife helped two astronauts come down to earth Thursday after six months in orbit. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and U.S. astronaut Edward Lu landed in Kazakhstan Tuesday after a trouble-free flight from the International Space Station. Lu said the thrill of life on the 16-nation orbital platform had more than made up for missing creature comforts. "It's a small price to pay not to be able to eat your favorite food or take a shower to get to live and work in space," he told a news conference. "But that being said, that first hot shower felt really good." Having wed his fiancee Ekaterina Dmitriev in August via a satellite video link from space, Malenchenko plunged straight into married life, although he did not want to elaborate. "Life continues on earth, I think we've got some plans -- but we will see," he said. The astronauts said they had been able to keep in touch with their families from the station via e-mail and video telephone. "I missed my family and fiancee, but we had very good communications on board and we were able to talk," said Lu. "I didn't feel that separated from my loved ones on the ground." The crew said concerns over air quality on the ISS were overblown and officials should focus on more immediate problems. Last week NASA officials said air and water monitors on the ISS were in disrepair, endangering the astronauts onboard. "This is a really long-term issue that is not a great danger," Lu said. "We can go quite a long time without fixing it as we can bring down samples and analyze them on the ground." "The situation up there ... has been a little overblown and is distracting from the real problems ... such as launching and landing," he said. Safety concerns dogged the run-up to their return to earth after the previous crew landed hundreds of miles off target. But the crew, accompanied by Spaniard Pedro Duque who was on a one-week mission, landed as planned Tuesday. The ISS has depended entirely on Russia for launches of manned and cargo ships to the platform since February, when the United States grounded its shuttles after the Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, killing the seven astronauts onboard. Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
