Russian space officials decided on Thursday to delay the launch of a Soyuz spaceship to the International Space Station (ISS) to Sep. 18, four days later than its original blast off date.

The decision on the launch date was made at a meeting of senior officials of the Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), agency spokesman Igor Panarin said, according to an Interfax news agency report.

The Soyuz craft will send a new crew -- Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria -- to the ISS and carry the world's first female space tourist, Iranian-born American Anousheh Ansari, for a 10-day trip to the orbiting lab.

The ship was originally set to lift off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sept. 14. Interfax earlier quoted Panarin as saying that the Soyuz's launch date depended on the liftoff date of the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis.

"The Americans have promised that the undocking (of the shuttle) will definitely be done before Sept. 17. They will clear the ISS portal for us and we will be able to launch the Soyuz," Roscosmos head Anatoly Perminov was quoted as saying after the meeting.

The Sep. 18 launch date followed repeated delays of Atlantis due to severe weather at the launch site. No new launch date has been set for Atlantis, but NASA wants to fly the shuttle by Sept. 7.

The unfinished space station depends on U.S. shuttles to bring large equipment for further construction, but NASA grounded the shuttle fleet for more than two years following the Columbia shuttle disaster, which killed seven astronauts onboard in February 2003.

Russia's manned Soyuz ships and Progress supply ships have since been the workhorses for the ISS, ferrying crews and supplies to keep the station ticking over during the long shutdown of the U.S. shuttle fleet.

Source: Xinhua