ISS Astronauts Swap Soyuz Spacecraft Parking Spots

Three astronauts took a brief trip around the International Space Station (ISS) Thursday to clear an orbital parking spot for an incoming crew and the next tourist bound for the high-flying laboratory.

ISS Expedition 14 flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin deftly guided his crew's Russian-built Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft to a berth at the aft end of the station's Zvezda service module at 6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT), ending a 24-minute trip that began at a docking port 80 feet (24 meters) away.

"It was nice and smooth, nice job," fellow Expedition 14 flight engineer Sunita Williams told Tyurin after the short flight. "Any landing you can float away from is a good landing."

Clad in their Russian-built Sokol spacesuits, Tyurin, Williams and Expedition 14 commander Michael Lopez-Alegria cast off from an Earth-facing docking port on the space station's Zarya control module at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) as both spacecraft flew 220 miles (354 kilometers) above the Pacific Ocean. Their destination port on the Zvezda module was cleared Tuesday with the successful jettison of an unmanned Progress 23 cargo ship.

A main battery glitch prompted the astronauts to switch to a backup system aboard their Soyuz vehicle before undocking, but had no other impact on brief spaceflight.

The Soyuz move cleared the Zarya docking port for the anticipated April 9 arrival of Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov, who will welcome Williams into their crew and relieve Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin.

The Expedition 15 cosmonauts are slated to launch April 7 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with U.S. space tourist Charles Simonyi, who will return with the Expedition 14 crew on April 20. Simonyi is paying more than $20 million for his 13-day spaceflight under an agreement between Russia's Federal Space Agency and the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures.

Thursday's Soyuz relocation marked the second orbital hop for the Expedition 14 crew. Lopez-Alegria, Tyurin and then-Expedition 14 crewmate Thomas Reiter -- of the European Space Agency -- performed a similar docking port swap in October 2006.

"The Soyuz relocation day is really a long day," ISS Expedition 14 increment manager Melissa Owens told SPACE.com before Thursday's flight. "Effectively, you lose about a week's worth of work to move that Soyuz."

Owens said most ISS crews typically perform only one Soyuz relocation during a mission, but Thursday's flight was added as a get ahead for the Expedition 15 crew. Without the flight, the Expedition 15 astronauts would have had to wedge their own Soyuz mini-flight just after settling in aboard the station to make way for an incoming cargo ship in May.

The Expedition 14 crew has had some spare time for extra science and ISS maintenance duties due to the delay of NASA's STS-117 shuttle flight. Hail damage to the Atlantis orbiter's external tank prevented a March 15 launch of the ISS construction mission, with a new liftoff target expected to be announced on April 10.

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