BEIJING (AP) â€" Three Chinese astronauts arrived Monday in Beijing to a homecoming parade after completing China's first spacewalk and putting the country closer to building a space station and landing a man on the moon.

State broadcaster CCTV showed the three, with flower garlands around their necks, waving and smiling as they were slowly driven through the streets at Beijing Aerospace Center, where they did their space training.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080929-ap-china-parade.html

China this week launches its most ambitious space mission yet, a sign of rising confidence as Beijing cements its status as a space power and potential future competitor to the United States.

The Shenzhou 7 mission, to launch as early as Thursday, will be the first to carry a full complement of three astronauts, one of whom will perform China's first spacewalk, or EVA for "extra-vehicular activity." It is China's third manned mission.

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The impact of Hurricane Ike has reached out into space and delayed the planned Friday arrival of Russian cargo ship at the International Space Station.

The unmanned Russian space freighter Progress 30 was slated to arrive at the space station tomorrow at 5:01 p.m. EDT (2101 GMT), but flight controllers at NASA's Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston had yet to move the orbiting laboratory's expansive solar arrays into position for the docking before closing down Thursday to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Ike.

"The Russians and [NASA] came to an agreement today to postpone docking until Wednesday," said John Yembrick, a NASA spokesperson at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson pledged Thursday to fast-track efforts to get congressional approval for a waiver NASA needs to get astronauts to the International Space Station after the space shuttles are retired in 2010.

"We are going to make a full, true-blue push to get (the waiver) passed," the Orlando Democrat said after emerging from a meeting with NASA Administrator Michael Griffin.

NASA needs the exemption to send crews aboard the Russian Soyuz vehicle beyond 2011. Otherwise, the United States has no way of reaching the $100 billion space station until the shuttle's replacement becomes available in 2015 or later.

For Austin game guru Richard Garriott, almost every vacation is a working one.

He won't be taking a BlackBerry and fax machine with him when he goes on his most adventurous trip yet this fall: a 10-day jaunt to the International Space Station.

But Garriott, who helped start the Austin video gaming industry, is using his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel aboard a Russian Soyuz spaceship to do much more than just sight-seeing. He'll be conducting experiments for research institutions, working with a nonprofit to mimic the pictures of Earth his astronaut father took in 1973 aboard Skylab, communicating with students around the world and marketing his latest computer game, Tabula Rasa.

An unmanned Russian-built cargo ship is headed for oblivion after casting off from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday.

The automated space tug Progress 29 undocked from an Earth-facing berth on the station's Russian Zarya control module Monday afternoon at 3:46 p.m. EDT (1946 GMT) to begin a week of engine tests before destroying itself in the Earth's atmosphere next week, officials with Russia's Federal Space Agency said.

"It went very well, exactly as planned," NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries told SPACE.com from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Federal Space Agency officials said Progress 29 will stay in space until Sept. 9 in order to perform a series of experiments designed to study the plasma environment surrounding its rocket engines. Then, the disposable spacecraft will be commanded to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean, they added.

TEHRAN, Iran â€" State TV says Iran's space agency aims to send an astronaut to space within 10 years.

The report Thursday quotes Space Agency chief Reza Taghipoor saying the mission's timing will be decided over the next year. It gives no other details.

Iran has stepped up its space ambitions in recent years, worrying world leaders already concerned about its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Iran would have a ways to go before a manned flight. On Sunday, Taghipoor said Iran test-fired a rocket capable of carrying a satellite into orbit. The two-stage rocket released equipment that beamed flight data back to ground control.

The countdown to the lighting of the cauldron and the fireworks that followed its ignition were not the only rocket-related allusions that led to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. Space explorers from at least three nations took part in carrying the torch to the Beijing National Stadium in China while the son of a U.S. astronaut prepared to compete as one of the athletes.

The flame's relay, which began in March from Greece, traveled longer than any previous torch -- over 85,000 miles (137,000 km), the equivalent of more than three orbits around the Earth's equator, visiting 130 cities in 130 days.

NASA Television will air interviews with each of the seven astronauts who will fly to the Hubble Space Telescope beginning at 8 a.m. EDT, on Monday, Aug. 11.

The crew includes Commander Scott Altman, Pilot Gregory C. Johnson, and mission specialists Michael Good, Megan McArthur, John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino and Andrew Feustel.

Media also may obtain copies of the interviews by contacting the Johnson Space Center Media Resource Center in Houston at 281-483-4231. For transcripts of the interviews, and more information on the space shuttle and the mission to Hubble, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/hst_sm4

The first flight of Russia's Soyuz medium-lift rocket from Europe's spaceport here still is pegged for the second half of 2009 but government and industry officials say privately that an early 2010 date looks more likely.

They said much will depend on the exact arrival dates of the ocean-going vessels carrying Russian-built Soyuz launch pad gear, and how well the 200-250 Russian pad construction workers, expected to begin arriving in late August, adapt to their tightly sequestered life here.

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