A US astronaut mourned the closure of the "tremendous" NASA space shuttle programme Thursday, as she prepared to blast off to the International Space Station (ISS).
"It takes my breath away. To see that go away is very bitter-sweet," NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson told reporters at a news conference at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
"It's bitter because we're saying goodbye to such a tremendous part of our space programme," said the astronaut who has flown as a crew member on the shuttle.
"It's sweet in that it was so successful and it brings to a close in such a positive way something that brought us success in all kinds of ways."
The US Discovery space shuttle is set to be mothballed at the end of this year, after which US astronauts will only be able to travel to the ISS in Russian three-seater Soyuz spacecraft.
The first shuttle launch in 1981, timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's historic first trip into space, is now seen as a defining moment of the Cold War space race.
Despite losing the shuttles Columbia and Challenger in a pair of disasters the programme was considered a resounding success and soon took on the lion's share of responsiblity for transporting US astronauts.
A successor to the Discovery is scheduled to take off no earlier than 2015.
Caldwell Dyson was set to blast off Friday onboard a Soyuz to carry out a six-month resupply mission with Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Korniyenko.
The astronauts will spend two days in the cramped Soyuz capsule before arriving at the ISS, where they will join US astronaut Timothy Creamer, Soichi Noguchi of Japan and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov.
The crew members plan to organize an improvised football match onboard the ISS to celebrate several members' birthdays in April, Skvortsov told journalists.
"Since Tracy likes football, it's possible that we will organize it on the station. But we haven't decided yet what we will use as a ball and how we will score goals," he said.
On Thursday the staff at Baikonur, which Russia has leased from Kazakhstan since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, were busy putting the final touches to the rocket, helped by a local Russian Orthodox priest.
The priest's flowing white robe fluttered in the wind as he doused the rocket with holy water, a recently introduced ritual that would have been unthinkable in Yuri Gagarin's day.
Rock musician Sergei Skachkov entertained the astronauts and their relatives with a song about homesick cosmonauts, titled "The Grass of Home," that has become an unofficial anthem of the Russian space programme.
"We wrote and recorded the song in 1983. At that time we couldn't imagine we would be singing the song for real cosmonauts," he told AFP.
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