The International Space Station will complete a major milestone toward its first launch as the first station piece, a U.S.-funded and Russian-built control module, is shipped from a Moscow factory next week to its Russian Space Agency launch site in Baikonur, Kazahkstan.

In advance of the shipment of the control module, formerly

called the Functional Cargo Block and designated by the Russian

acronym FGB, a rollout ceremony and press conference will be

held at the Khrunichev State Research and Production Center in

Moscow at 11 a.m. Moscow time on Saturday, Jan. 17. Highlights

of the rollout ceremony will be broadcast, tape-delayed, on

NASA Television at 3 p.m. EST Saturday, with a repeat airing at

6 p.m. EST. The actual shipping of the control module is

scheduled to begin on Thursday, Jan. 22.

The 20-ton module is targeted for a late June launch to

begin the five-year, 45-flight orbital assembly of the new

space station. It will be launched on a Russian Proton rocket

from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan. The control module

was built by the Khrunichev factory, under contract to The

Boeing Company, the prime contractor to NASA for the

International Space Station. It will depart Khrunichev via a

special rail car late next week to begin the 1,200-mile, five-

day train journey to Baikonur, where it will begin five months

of launch preparations and final testing.

"When the control module arrives at Baikonur, all of the

elements for our first two launches will be undergoing final

launch processing," International Space Station program manager

Randy Brinkley said. "The year of the International Space

Station is 1998. This is something that all of us have looked

forward to for a very long time. We have a lot of exciting and

challenging activities ahead as we begin our assembly in orbit.

The incredible efforts of a worldwide engineering and

development team will be coming to fruition, and a new,

unprecedented phase of space construction will begin."

Shortly after the control module is launched from Russia,

Endeavour will launch on Space Shuttle mission STS-88 from the

Kennedy Space Center, FL, with the second piece of the station,

a connecting module called Node-1, built by Boeing at NASA's

Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL.

The node was shipped to Kennedy to begin a year of launch preparations and

final testing in June 1997. Two mating adpaters have since been shipped to Kennedy from California and are being attached to the node prior to its launch. Endeavour's crew will dock the control module to the node and perform three spacewalks to make final connections between the two components during the 11-day flight.

The station will then await the launch of the

Russian-built Service Module, a component that will become the

early living quarters, targeted for December. The first crew

of the new station is planned for launch on a mission in early

1999.

The 20-ton control module will provide early power and

propulsion for the station as well as the capability to

remotely rendezvous and dock with the Service Module.

Construction began on the control module at Khrunichev in

December 1994.