The meeting with NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe will be held in Vancouver from October 4 to 8. "It is expected to cover not only further exploitation of the International Space Station, but also ways of exploring deep space, ecological issues connected with space debris and a number of other matters," Perminov said, replying to the question put to him by RIA Novosti.
"The news has broken," Perminov added, "that in March 2005, the space shuttles will resume flying. We expect our partners to confirm this at our Vancouver meeting. This is very important for Russia."
The shuttles were grounded after one of the spacecraft Columbia crashed on February 1, 2003. Since then crews and supplies to the ISS have been delivered only by Russian manned Soyuz craft and Progress freighters.
A spokesman for the Gagarin cosmonaut-training centre told RIA Novosti that the next, 10th, ISS crew is flying on Monday for Baikonur, where on October 14 they will blast off aboard a Soyuz-TMA spacecraft.
The main crew of the ISS-10 expedition will consist of two men - cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov (Russia) and astronaut Leroy Chiao (US).
"Their flight is to last 180 days. At the same time, Yury Shargin, a representative of the Space Forces of Russia, will for the first time go on a 10-day mission. He will return to Earth on October 24, together with Russia's Gennady Padalka and American Michael Finck, whose stay in the orbit is winding up," the spokesman said.
For technical reasons, the blast-off of the Soyuz-TMA from Baikonur to the ISS has been twice pushed back, and is finally set for October 14. "Specialists found it necessary to move the launch of the Soyuz-TMA from October 9 to October 11, and then to October 14," the official spokesman, Vyacheslav Davidenko, said.
Valery Lyndin, an official spokesman for Central Mission Control, told RIA Novosti that the Soyuz-TMA is scheduled to dock with the ISS on October 15 in an automatic mode.
