Sochi, 24th June An all-time first, as partners of the Sochi 2014 Olympic Torch Relay, the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will take the Olympic torch to the International Space Station (ISS) and for a walk in outer space.
The agreement for this singular event was recently signed by the President of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko, and the head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin.
The Olympic Torch, which for safety reasons will not be lit, will travel to the ISS on the Soyuz TMA-11M manned spaceship at the beginning of November 2013. Once in space, Russian cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky and Oleg Kotov, who have already started training at the Gagarin Research and Test Cosmonaut Training Centre, will take the Olympic torch on a spacewalk. The honourable mission of passing the torch to the spaceship crew is the responsibility of its captain, Mikhail Tyurin, having received it from the hands of Vladimir Popovkin.
The Sochi 2014 Olympic Torch will return to Earth with cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, who is currently on the ISS. While based on the ISS in 2007, he and his colleague Oleg Kotov supported the Olympic bid presentation that was made in Guatemala, following which Sochi was elected as the host city of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.
“Nobody has done this before,” said Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee President Dmitry Chernyshenko, “the spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts with the Sochi 2014 Olympic torch will be a momentous moment in the history of the Olympic Torch Relay.”
According to the organizers’ calculations, the Olympic Torch Relay, which gets under way in Sochi on October 7th 2013, will reach 90% of the Russian population, meaning that approximately 130 million Russian citizens will be able to watch or participate directly in the Relay. In total, it will cover more than 65,000 kilometres, including travelling by car, train, plane, Russian troika and even reindeer sleigh.