CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The three crewman aboard the International Space Station briefly abandoned ship this morning when they moved their Soyuz rescue craft to a different docking port at the outpost.

The pre-planned maneuver clears the way for a robot Progress freighter to dock with the station on Wednesday. That Progress is scheduled to launch at 3:09 a.m. EST (08:09 GMT) Sunday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and will be carrying a supply of food, equipment and supplies for the crew.

Despite poor communication between the Soyuz spacecraft and Mission Control near Moscow, cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko executed the flight plan without any apparent trouble, taking about 31 minutes to complete the task.

Fellow cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and astronaut Bill Shepherd were in the Soyuz with Gidzenko, dressed in full spacesuits just in case something went wrong and the trio was forced to return to Earth.

For the same reason, before departing, the crew essentially put the space station's systems on autopilot so that flight controllers on the ground could keep the outpost healthy until a new crew could return, arriving either on a Soyuz or a Space Shuttle.