'NSPACE: DIARY OF A COSMONAUT.(what singer Lance Bass might say about being an astronaut)(Humor)

Pop star Lance Bass is back at Russia's cosmonaut center for a new training session, despite being excluded from the crew of a rocket heading to the international space station next month. The 'NSync singer, who was ordered to leave the Star City cosmonaut training ground earlier this month after failing to pay for the trip, has returned to the center outside Moscow.--Associated Press

November 4: First meeting with the Russian astronauts. The youngest guy knows the words to all the 'NSync songs. His name is Boris, and I like him the best. Sasha and Grigory are O.K., too. The only one I am a little afraid of is Pyotor, the captain, who is stern and can grow a beard. I like to think of us as a boy band: an older, non-singing, non-American boy band that's really smart about science and stuff.

November 5: Today, I taught Boris how to do the dance routine from "Girlfriend." I cannot ever forget that I am a cultural ambassador.

November 6: Huge news today! Grigory got sick--too much Tang--and I got promoted from trainee to crew member. That means I'm going into space. This made Boris happy, but not Captain Pyotor. When he saw me, he said that my last name rhymes with "ass," which is true but not nice, and then he cursed at me in Russian. He called me sobaka and podlets and preposterous.

November 7: I cannot possibly describe the sublime experience of blastoff--the fulminous roar of the engines, the craft's upjut into infinite space. It recalls to me Wordsworth's description of escaping from the deck of a steamboat: "That he might fly, where no one could pursue, / From this dull Monster and her sooty crew; / And, as a God, light on thy topmost cliff."

...