An astronaut, a cosmonaut and the first repeat space tourist
are poised to launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) early
Thursday.
NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, Russian
cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and paying American billionaire Charles
Simonyi are due
to liftoff Thursday aboard a Soyuz TMA-14 rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur
Cosmodrome at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT).
The new station crew and space tourist are launching one day
after the departure of NASA's
shuttle Discovery, which delivered new solar wings to the orbiting lab to
complete its power grid.
Commander Padalka and flight engineer Barratt will join
Japanese Space Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, currently
onboard the ISS, to make up the station's Expedition 19 crew, the last
three-person crew planned before expanded six-person teams take up residence
this summer. Wakata arrived aboard Discovery and is staying aboard to join the
station's new crew.
Here's a look at the space station's new crew, which will
replace the outpost's Expedition 18 commander Michael Fincke and flight
engineer Yury Lonchakov:
Doctor and naval enthusiast
Barratt, a rookie astronaut, is a medical doctor
specializing in aerospace medicine.
"For me it's quite a dream come true, because having
that keen interest in how the human body changes in space and being able
eventually to experience it is going to be a wonderful thing," Barratt
told SPACE.com in a recent interview.
Barratt is married and has two daughters and three sons. He
said he'll be taking up to space a music mix compiled by his children, who each
have different tastes, including country music, classical, heavy metal, oldies,
and Disney tunes (his youngest is 8 years old).
While on the space station, Barratt also plans to assemble a
model of the 18th century tall ship HM Bark Endeavour, after which the NASA
space shuttle Endeavour was named.
"I plan to do some comparisons and contrasts between
space voyaging and sea voyaging," Barratt said.
Expert commander
Padalka will be the first spaceflyer to serve as station
commander twice; he previously commanded the orbiting lab for a six-month stint
during Expedition 9 in 2004. His return to station is a reunion of sorts. During
Expedition 9, he served alongside the station's current skipper Fincke, who was
a flight engineer on that mission.
"It's a big honor for me, to be crew commander for a
second time onboard International Space Station, and at the same time it's a
big responsibility for me, because as a crew commander I need to ensure safety
[of the] crew," Padalka said in a preflight interview. "I need to
ensure ... very comfortable psychological climate, inside the crew and between
crewmates, because we are supposed to have many nations, and with different
customs, mentalities, traditions."
Padalka, who is married and has three daughters, is an
experienced pilot and parachuter.
"He's one of the best spaceflyers and commanders in the
business," Barratt said of his crewmate. "I'm lucky enough to be his
flight engineer on the Soyuz."
Padalka and Barratt will be joined for the ride into space
by American billionaire Charles Simonyi. A software developer and former
Microsoft executive, Simonyi will become the first civilian to fly to space
twice, though a $35 million deal with the Russian Federal Space Agency Brokered
by the U.S. firm Space Adventures. For more about Simonyi, click
here.
Gearing up for more roommates
The Expedition 19 crew will have their work cut out for them
setting the stage to welcome double-sized crews to their orbiting habitat. They
will host two visiting shuttle missions, STS-127 in May and STS-128 in August,
which are set to drop off NASA astronauts Timothy Kopra and Nicole Stott to
join the space station crew.
Padalka and Barratt have two to three spacewalks planned to
help prepare the station for the arrival of the Mini Research Module 2, a node
very similar to the Pirs docking compartment currently in orbit, set to launch
on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in August.
"One of our biggest milestones is increasing to a
six-person crew, so there will be a lot going on and all the attendant
activities that go with that, including robotics and EVA, experiments and
everything that makes ISS what it is," Barratt said in a NASA preflight
interview.
Padalka and Barratt are due to stay aboard the station for
200 days.
SPACE.com will provide full coverage of Simonyi's second
space tourist flight and the Expedition 19 mission with reporter Clara Moskowitz
and senior editor Tariq Malik in New York. Click here for mission updates
and SPACE.com's live NASA TV video feed.
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