Russia sets new Soyuz launch date on April 5 - Reuters, Mar 21, 2011
Space agency chief Anatoly Perminov was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying the Soyuz TMA-21 would blast off at 1118 GMT on April 5 from Russia's Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan. Russia delayed the launch to resolve a communication problem with the Soyuz, raising fears over its reliability and whether the mission would begin in time to honour the April 12 anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first manned flight into space. Russian Soyuz spacecraft is used since 2009 exclusively for space station crew transport.
To my understanding, reliability is the most important issue now, when Russia is the only provider of the transport spacecraft in the world. Russian space industry, being in decline since the desintegration of the Soviet Union, somewhat recovered dusring the last few years, when the government started to invest more money into the spacecraft design and production. New launch pad is being built currently in Russia's Far East, called Vostoichy Cosmodrome.
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