For Alex -- Russians: 'It's our space age now'

A Russian Soyuz craft leaves the International Space Station with three crew members in November 2010.

Russian space officials are hailing the end of the space shuttle era as the beginning of the "Soyuz epoch." For at least the next few years, Russian Soyuz craft will serve as the only way to get back and forth from the International Space Station, and NASA will be paying up to $63 million a seat for the ride.

Russian cosmonauts will also make up half of the space station's crews from here on out, even though NASA has paid most of the estimated $100 billion cost of construction.

The Soyuz epoch was heralded on Thursday by the Russian Federal Space Agency in a news releasethat also paid tribute to the shuttle era. The Russian-language report says that the shuttle fleet's retirement marks a "new stage in the International Space Station program, in which the Russian Soyuz spaceships have no backups."

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