BAIKONUR (Kazakhstan) Oct 20: French astronaut Claudie Haignere will lift off for the International Space Station on Sunday accompanied by two Russian cosmonauts and her own personal mascot — a teddy bear.

Space travel is a family affair for the 44-year-old engineer who met her future husband during training for a 1996 trip to Russia’s veteran Mir space station and married him after both visited the now defunct craft.

Haignere, who will become the first French citizen to visit the ISS, told reporters on Saturday at the Baikonur cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppes she planned to add a personal touch to her eight-day stay, expected to be heavy on scientific research.

“I am taking with me books and photos which I will present to my friends after the mission,” the flight engineer said in fluent Russian.

“I will certainly take a photo of my daughter and my personal talisman — a teddy bear.”

Also accompanying her on the trip will be the Haigneres’ old friend Viktor Afanasyev, a Russian cosmonaut dubbed by the press “space commander of the Haignere family” for leading Claudie’s husband, Jean-Pierre, on a flight to Mir in 1999.

The third person on the Soyuz craft, which is due to lift off at 0859 GMT on Sunday, will be 34-year-old Russian flight engineer Konstantin Kozeyev.

Kozeyev confessed to feeling nervous ahead of his first trip into space. “All the same, I want to fly so much,” he said with a smile.

The crew’s main duty will be to replace the station’s escape ship. Their mission will be the third manned trip from Baikonur to the $95 billion station, whose first block was launched in 1998 and which is being built jointly by the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan.—Reuters