Two NASA
astronauts and the next space tourist are bound for Russia to prepare for 15th
expedition to the International
Space Station (ISS).
NASA
astronauts Daniel Tani and Clayton Anderson will head to Russia's Star City cosmonaut training center this weekend to join their ISS
Expedition 15 commander Fyodor
Yurchikin and fellow flight engineer Oleg Kotov, NASA officials said Friday.
"Our goal
is to assemble the ISS and outfit it with all the elements we have planed,"
Yurchikin, commander of the Expedition 15 mission, said in a recent mission
press briefing. "We hope to do a good job."
U.S.
entrepreneur Charles Simonyi, who is poised to become the fifth tourist to
visit the ISS, will also make his way to Star City for final training next week,
Erin Lundberg, a spokesperson for the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures
that arranged Simonyi's flight, told SPACE.com Friday.
Initially
slated for a March
9 space shot, Simonyi and the Expedition 15 crew are now set to lift off on
April 9, NASA spokesperson Lynette Madison, of the agency's Johnson Space Center, told SPACE.com. The mission will wait until after the planned
March 16 liftoff of NASA's STS-117 mission to deliver new solar arrays to the
ISS.
"I view the
spaceflight as kind of the exclamation point at the end of a very long
sentence," Simonyi said last month. "I'd like to advance civilian spaceflight
and I'd like to assist space station research to the extent that I can."
Simonyi is
paying between $20-25 million for his ISS spaceflight. He plans to serve as a
test subject for biomedical experiments while in orbit, and is chronicling the
flight on his website: www.charlesinspace.com.
Simonyi's flight and four others - most recently that of U.S.
businesswoman Anousheh Ansari - were each brokered by Space Adventures with
Russia's Federal Space Agency.
Simonyi
will launch beside veteran cosmonaut Yurchikin and Kotov, who is making his
first spaceflight, aboard their Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft from Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He will spend just over a week aboard the ISS before
returning to Earth with Expedition
14 commander Michael
Lopez-Alegria and veteran cosmonaut Mikhail
Tyurin.
Yurchikin
and Kotov expect to spend six months in orbit and will join NASA astronaut Sunita
Williams - currently aboard the ISS as an Expedition 14 flight engineer -
who herself will be relieved by Anderson during NASA's planned STS-118 shuttle
flight in June.
Tani will
subsequently relieve Anderson during the STS-120
shuttle mission to install a new connecting element - known
as Node 2 - to the ISS in September. Node 2 is vital for the space
station's expansion since it will serve as a hub, connecting European and Japanese
modules to the rest of the orbital laboratory.
"It's kind
of complex and it's kind of confusing," Tani said last month of the astronaut
shuffle, adding that it could mean he won't be able to join the Expedition
15 crew if his shuttle flight is delayed, but at least he will be trained to handle
the Node 2 construction. "So it's a very exciting time for the station and I'm
thrilled to be a part of that."
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