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| Image above: Michael E. Lopez-Alegria (right), Mikhail
Tyurin and Anousheh Ansari. Photo credit: Roscosmos / Gagarin Cosmonaut
Training Center |
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14th International Space Station crew launches from Baikonur
Two radio amateurs, Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, KE5GTK, and Cosmonaut
Mikhail Tyurin, RZ3FT, of the 14th International Space Station crew, launched
from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:09 a.m. EDT Monday to
begin a six-month stay in space.
With them is American Anousheh Ansari, the first female spaceflight participant
to visit the orbiting laboratory. She is flying under contract with the
Russian Federal Space Agency.
She will return to Earth with the Expedition 13 crew, Commander Pavel
Vinogradov, RV3BS, and NASA Science Officer Jeff Williams, KD5TVQ, on
Sept. 28. Expedition 13 launched to the station on March 30.
Expedition 14's Soyuz TMA spacecraft is scheduled to dock at the station
at 1:24 a.m. on Sept. 20.
There they will be greeted by their third Expedition 14 crew member,
European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter of Germany. Reiter, DF4TR,
arrived at the station aboard Discovery on the STS-121 mission in July.
He joined Expedition 13, bringing the number of station crew members to
three for the first time since May 2003.
Lopez-Alegria, 45, will be making his fourth flight into space. He flew
three space shuttle missions. On Expedition 14, he also will serve as
NASA science officer.
Tyurin, 46, is making his second spaceflight. He served as a member of
the station's Expedition 3 crew in 2001, which launched in August and
landed in December. He is the second long-duration crew member to be assigned
to a second station expedition. Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was a member
of the Expedition 1 and Expedition 11 station crews.
Reiter is the first European Space Agency astronaut to server as a long-duration
International Space Station crew member. His presence for the first part
of Expedition 14 will be valuable for his new crewmates because of his
knowledge of the station and its systems. Previous oncoming crews have
relied on intense handovers of just over a week with the predecessor crew
members before taking over station operations themselves.
Reiter, who served as a crew member on the Russian space station Mir
for six months in 1995, is scheduled to return to Earth aboard Discovery
on STS-116 in December.
Discovery will bring Astronaut Sunita Williams to the station to replace
Reiter and join Expedition 14 in progress. Williams, 41, a Navy commander,
will be making her first spaceflight. She is scheduled to remain on the
station until next spring.
Discovery also will bring the P5 truss to the station. While it is docked,
station and shuttle crews will reconfigure the orbiting laboratory's electrical
system and activate the new solar arrays brought up by Atlantis on STS-115.
Expedition 14 will do as many as four spacewalks, perhaps three in January
in U.S. spacesuits, relating to station assembly. The other would be done
earlier in Russian spacesuits to retrieve and install experiments.
Two Expedition 15 crew members are expected to arrive next spring to
replace Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin
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