American
software developer Charles Simonyi, the next paying tourist to visit the International Space
Station (ISS), will get two extra days in orbit - at no additional cost -
thanks to a tricky bit of orbital mechanics.
Instead of
an 11-day trip to the ISS with two
Russian cosmonauts, Simonyi is now gearing up for 13 days in orbit after
station mission managers extended the flight to maintain a desired landing
trajectory, NASA officials told SPACE.com.
Simonyi is
training to launch towards the ISS on April 7 with Expedition
15 commander Fyodor
Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov, who will take control of the
station from its current Expedition
14 crew [image].
Their Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft is due to dock at the space station on April 9.
"Normally,
the docked operations are nine days," NASA spokesperson Rob Navias, of the
agency's Johnson Space Center, adding that the two-day extension is designed so
Simonyi and two Expedition
14 astronauts will touch down at their landing site in daylight on April 20.
"This is unusual in a sense that it is a little bit longer than usual docked
ops, but it's all designed to bring in the proper landing site."
Simonyi is
paying more
than $20 million for his spaceflight under a deal brokered with Russia's Federal
Space Agency by the Virginia-based space
tourism firm Space Adventures.
"To Dr.
Simonyi's benefit, he will have the additional days on the ISS at no extra cost,"
Space Adventures spokesperson Erin Lundberg told SPACE.com.
With the
planned 13-day mission, Simonyi is expected to set a new record by racking up the most days in space
ever for a private spaceflyer, Space Adventures officials added [image].
Yurchikhin and Kotov, meanwhile, will settle in for a six-month stay aboard the
ISS and join their third crew member, NASA
astronaut Sunita Williams, already aboard the station.
A native of
Hungary and lifelong
space enthusiast, Simonyi, 58, is the co-founder of Intentional Software
Corp. and a former Microsoft software developer. He plans to participate in a
series of biomedical experiments during his now 13-day spaceflight, and has
kept a continuous
log of his training activities via his website: www.charlesinspace.com.
Landing
trajectory key
Navias said
that Russian mission managers had to adjust their launch and landing plans for
the Expedition
15-Simonyi flight due to the delay of NASA's
STS-117 mission. That flight was slated
to liftoff March 15 to deliver new
solar arrays to the ISS, but a severe Feb. 26 hail storm damaged
its external tank and pushed the mission's launch to mid-May
at the earliest.
"When STS-117
was delayed, the whole phasing plan for Soyuz had to change as well," Navias
said, adding that the two-day mission extension is the first since NASA began returning
astronauts to Earth aboard Soyuz spacecraft.
Russian
mission managers originally planned to extend the docked mission one day - with
a landing set for April 19 - when they chose the April 7 launch date. The measure would ensure that Simonyi and Expedition 14 astronauts Michael
Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail
Tyurin would touch down at their intended landing site before sunset.
The delay
of NASA's STS-117 mission, and the station's successful orbital
reboost last week, prompted an extra day in orbit for Simonyi in maintain
that daylight landing, now set for April 20 at 7:30 p.m. Local Time on the
steppes of Kazakhstan near the city of Arkalyk, Navias said.
Russian
mission managers prefer daylight Soyuz landings to help recovery crews locate
the spacecraft quickly in the event of an emergency, NASA has said in the past.
During the additional two days of docked operations, the Expedition 14 and 15 astronauts plan to perform extra orbital training and familiarization tasks, as well as some other chores to ready the station for the arrival of NASA's STS-117 shuttle crew, Navias said.
Simonyi
will be the fifth space tourist to visit the ISS since the 2001 spaceflight of American businessman Dennis Tito. South
African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth flew to the ISS in 2002, followed by
Americans Greg
Olsen, in 2005, and Anousheh
Ansari in 2006 [image].
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