After a decade of construction, the International Space
Station will finally live up to its name this week when the first six-person
crew takes up residence with astronauts from five different countries.
The second half of the station's inaugural
six-member crew is poised to launch Wednesday at 6:34 a.m. EDT (1034 GMT)
aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome. They will
arrive on Friday to join the first wave of their crew already aboard the
station.
When the new Soyuz crew joins the three astronauts already
waiting on the
orbiting laboratory, it will be the first time, ever, that all five of the
station's international partner agencies (NASA, the Russian Federal Space
Agency (Roscosmos), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the European
Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA)) – will be represented
on orbit at once. It's fitting the cosmic line-up coincided with the station's
first six-person crew.
"At this time we will have Canadian, Russian, American,
European and Japanese guy on board space station, and I would say it's [an]
outstanding event," Expedition 20 space station commander Gennady
Padalka, a Russian cosmonaut, said in a preflight interview. "You know
that all these countries have been participating in ISS project for 10 years as
a minimum, and now it's pretty high time to have all these astronauts and
cosmonauts together working in space."
Construction on the International Space Station began in
1998, with the first three-man tenants setting up shop in 2000, once living
quarters arrived. Today, the station is home to Padalka, American astronaut
Michael Barratt and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.
On Wednesday, russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko will command
the Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraftthat will launch himself, Belgian astronaut Frank De
Winne of ESA, and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk. The three spaceflyers are
due to dock at the space station Friday morning.
"When we all get together at the table we will see that
we are people from all corners of the world, working together as a single team
to execute our mission program, and I want to believe that we will be able to
find a common language and that we will all be happy to be part of this
family," Romanenko said in a NASA interview.
The astronauts will have more to drink at their dinner
table. Last week, the station crew officially began consuming water recycled
from their own urine and sweat, part of vital life support gear designed specifically
to support a full six-person crew.
New arrivals
Romanenko, a former Russian air force pilot, will be making
his first trip to space after joining the Russian Space Agency in 1997. He is
married and has one son.
De Winne is a former test pilot for the Belgian air force,
and joined ESA in 2000. He is married and has three children. De Winne is a
veteran of a 2002 Soyuz trip to the space station and is set to assume command
of the Expedition 21 mission after Padalka flies home in October. When he takes
the helm he will become the first European station commander.
"This is the first for Europe that there will be an ESA
astronaut commanding the International Space Station, and that's of course very
important for ESA, our European agency, which has invested a lot in the
International Space Station," De Winne said.
Thirsk was a medical doctor before he joined the CSA in
1983. In 1996 he flew on the space shuttle science mission STS-78, which was
devoted to materials and life science research. He is Canada's first
long-duration astronaut.
Getting crowded
Padalka, Barratt and Wakata on the station now are currently
serving as the station's Expedition 19 crew. They will shift to Expedition 20,
with Padalka still in charge, when their new crewmates arrive Friday.
"I think for us to expand our frontiers in space,
international cooperation is essential," Wakata said in a preflight
interview. "The ISS project has demonstrated that it's possible."
The members of the double-sized crew will have their work
cut out for them, with a full schedule of research and space station
maintenance planned. The international nature of the crew should also provide
some fun chances for cross-cultural learning.
"We look at each other as much more as colleagues than
ambassadors but at the same time we're well aware that we represent nations and
agencies and we want to serve the best interests of all of those as well,"
Barratt said in an interview before his flight. "We enjoy one another's
food and company and we just have a great time together."
The astronauts are prepared for some wrangling to take place
as they try to adjust to a more crowded space station than they've been used
to.
"The ground is doing a great job, and they try to take
into account on all details, and they try to envisage all problems,"
Padalka said. "But at the same time we are ready to put up with some
tiny problems and ready to work with the ground as one team to resolve them."
More science
With the start of large crews, the space station is entering
a new phase where spaceflyers hope to move beyond the basics of building the
station, which has been the focus of most missions so far.
A major goal of the Expedition 20 mission is to "help
transition the space station program from a phase that has been dominated by
assembly, to one of utilization to help the station fulfill its new
responsibility as a world-class facility for doing research and
development," Thirsk said.
And if the space station starts to feel crowded when the
first six-person crew arrives, wait till the space shuttle Endeavour visits
during its June STS-127 flight.
"If you consider that the permanent crew will be six, a
visiting shuttle will be seven, now we'll have up to 13 on the space
station," Barratt said. "As far as I know, that's the most we've
ever had on a single platform in space in history, so we'll look forward to
seeing how all that works."
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