FIRST STATION ELEMENT TO BE SHIPPED TO RUSSIAN LAUNCH SITE



January 16, 1998



Michael Braukus
Headquarters, Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/358-1979)



James Hartsfield
Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX
(Phone: 281/483-5111)

<h4>Release: H98-7</h4> <h3>First Station Element to be Shipped to 
Russian Launch Site</h3> 

The International Space Station will complete a major milestone toward 
its first launch as the first station piece, a U.S.-funded and 
Russian-built control module, is shipped from a Moscow factory next 
week to its Russian Space Agency launch site in Baikonur, Kazahkstan.



In advance of the shipment of the control module, formerly called the 
Functional Cargo Block and designated by the Russian acronym FGB, a 
rollout ceremony and press conference will be held at the Khrunichev 
State Research and Production Center in Moscow at 11 a.m. Moscow time 
on Saturday, Jan. 17. Highlights of the rollout ceremony will be 
broadcast, tape-delayed, on NASA Television at 2 p.m. CST Saturday, 
with a repeat airing at 5 p.m. CST. The actual shipping of the 
control module is scheduled to begin on Thursday, Jan. 22.



The 20-ton module is targeted for a late June launch to begin the 
five-year, 45-flight orbital assembly of the new space station. It 
will be launched on a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur 
Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan. The control module was built by the 
Khrunichev factory, under contract to The Boeing Company, the prime 
contractor to NASA for the International Space Station. It will 
depart Khrunichev via a special rail car late next week to begin the 
1,200-mile, five-day train journey to Baikonur, where it will begin 
five months of launch preparations and final testing.



"When the control module arrives at Baikonur, all of the elements for 
our first two launches will be undergoing final launch processing," 
International Space Station program manager Randy Brinkley said. "The 
year of the International Space Station is 1998. This is something 
that all of us have looked forward to for a very long time. We have a 
lot of exciting and challenging activities ahead



as we begin our assembly in orbit. The incredible efforts of a 
worldwide engineering and development team will be coming to 
fruition, and a new, unprecedented phase of space construction will 
begin."



Shortly after the control module is launched from Russia, Endeavour 
will launch on Space Shuttle mission STS-88 from the Kennedy Space 
Center, FL, with the second piece of the station, a connecting module 
called Node-1, built by Boeing at NASA's Marshall Space Flight 
Center, Huntsville, AL. The node was shipped to Kennedy to begin a 
year of launch preparations and final testing in June 1997. Two 
mating adapters have since been shipped to Kennedy from California 
and are being attached to the node prior to its launch. Endeavour's 
crew will dock the control module to the node and perform three 
spacewalks to make final connections between the two components 
during the 11-day flight. The station will then await the launch of 
the Russian-built Service Module, a component that will become the 
early living quarters, targeted for December. The first crew of the 
new station is planned for launch on a mission in early 1999.



The 20-ton control module will provide early power and propulsion for 
the station as well as the capability to remotely rendezvous and dock 
with the Service Module. Construction began on the control module at 
Khrunichev in December 1994.



NASA Television is available in the continental United States and is 
carried on GE-2, Transponder 9C, 85 degrees West longitude, vertical 
polarization, with a frequency of 3880 Mhz, and audio of 6.8 Mhz.



NOTE TO EDITORS: Raw video of the event will be available Saturday at 
7:30 a.m. CST on Galaxy 6, Transponder 17.

	
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