Two Russian cosmonauts training for a U.S. shuttle flight say they'd gladly spend eight days on the small and crowded spaceship. That's barely any time at all for them.
Vladimir Titov and Sergei Krikalev have 21/2 years of space experience between them."From the perspective of flying one year, I can tell you that an eight-day mission is not much," Titov said Tuesday. Still, he said, it would be a "dream come true" to fly on the shuttle.
Only one of the cosmonauts will join five Americans aboard Discovery for a research mission in November; the other will serve as a backup. Russian space officials are expected to announce any day which cosmonaut will go.
Titov, 46, has spent 368 days in space, a record 366 of them on a single mission. Krikalev, 34, has 463 days to his credit; he was stuck on Russia's Mir space station during the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Titov and Krikalev, the first Russians to train for a shuttle flight, have been working up to 16 hours a day, five days a week, since arriving with their families at NASA's Johnson Space Center in November. In between training, they've taken in the rodeo and gone square dancing with their new NASA friends.
The November flight - the first U.S.-Russian manned space mission since the Apollo-Soyuz docking in 1975 - is part of an agreement reached by Presidents Bush and Boris Yeltsin last summer.