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President Putin congratulated the Russian-American crew on Cosmonautics Day and said that the current expedition to the International Space Station had gone past its flight schedule due to the shuttle Columbia disaster. Russia sincerely empathised with the American people when the American spacecraft crashed on February 1. President Putin once again paid tribute to the American astronauts’ courage.

President Putin said that with shuttle flights grounded it was now important to keep the station in a working state.

In that context the Russian Government decided to amass the necessary resources to build additional spacecraft for orbiting.

He said that if Russia and the United States combined their efforts, experience, expertise and technology, they could make new and serious advances for the sake of civilisation. “A common success” was how he described the development of the International Space Station, which took experts from 19 countries to build and has already yielded practical returns.

President Putin briefly toured the academy and inspected space equipment, including rocket engines manufactured in Russia and a replica of a Kosmos rocket, where he symbolically put his signature.