Two veteran
astronauts and Malaysia's first spaceflyer are settling into orbital life as
they near the midpoint of a crew swap aboard the International Space Station
(ISS).
ISS Expedition
16 commander Peggy Whitson and flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko are taking
charge of the station from its previous crew while visiting Malaysian astronaut
Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor performs science experiments for his government's space
agency. The three spaceflyers arrived
at the ISS on Friday and are in the midst of a nine-day exchange with the
station's current Expedition 15 crew.
"It
felt very much like coming home again," Whitson, the space station's first
female commander and a veteran ISS astronaut, told reporters Monday of
arriving at the ISS.
Whitson
and Malenchenko have both served on past long-duration ISS crews and
launched toward the space station with Shukor on Oct. 10. They are replacing
Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov, who are
wrapping up their own six-month mission and are set to land with Shukor on Oct.
21 while their third crewmate -- NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson -- stays on as
part of the station's new crew.
"I'm a
little concerned about this whip thing that Peggy got in Russia," Anderson
jokingly told the Associated Press today in an interview on NASA TV. "I'm kind of waiting for
her to kind of take it out here and kind of put me in line."
Well-wishers
presented Whitson with a traditional
Kazakh whip in good humor to keep her male crewmates in check before she launched
spaceward from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Central Asia.
While the
joint crews of Expedition 15 and Expedition 16 work on their handover, Shukor
tackled his science experiments and took some time to peer at his home planet
from space.
"The
first time I looked out the window and I saw the view of Earth it was such an
amazing feeling," he told reporters. "It was so spectacular that heart
stopped beating and my eyes stopped blinking."
Shukor is
flying to the ISS as part of a commercial deal between Russian and his
Malaysian government for Russian-built military aircraft. He said that while he
has taken some lessons from the NASA and Russian astronauts on how best to move
in the weightlessness of space, but the overall transition to life without
gravity has gone well.
"I'm
actually quite surprised how I responded to space," Shukor said, crediting
his Russian instructors and a spinning chair training device for preparing him
for spaceflight. "I was expecting much worse."
Meanwhile, the
Expedition 16 crew is looking ahead to what promises to be a busy first half of
their orbital mission.
Less than
one week after Shukor and the Expedition 15 crew depart the ISS, NASA's space
shuttle Discovery is due to launch its STS-120 mission to deliver a vital
connecting node to the orbital laboratory. The Expedition 16 crew also plans to
stage two spacewalks and host a planned December shuttle flight bearing a
European-built laboratory, a well as a Russian cargo ship, before the year is
out.
"It's
going to be very exciting, very challenging," Whitson said. "And
we're really excited about getting started."
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