HOUSTON — A Russian Soyuz spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Dec. 15, initiating a five-month expedition to the International Space Station that will feature a flurry of multinational cargo mission activities intended to prepare the orbiting lab for the approaching retirement of NASA’s space shuttle fleet.
The Soyuz TMA-20 crew — Dmitri Kondratyev, a 41-year-old Russian air force colonel; NASA’s Catherine Coleman, a 50-year-old chemical engineer and retired U.S. Air Force colonel; and the European Space Agency’s Paolo Nespoli, a 53-year-old Italian aerospace engineer — launched from the Russian complex in Kazakhstan at 2:09 p.m. EST on Dec. 15, just after 1 a.m. local time.
The spacecraft was scheduled to dock with the station on Dec. 17, just after 3 p.m. EST. The newcomers will be greeted by Expedition 26 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA, and Russians Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka.
“Getting them up to speed is very important,” Kelly said of the TMA-20 crew. “There is a lot on our plate. A lot of it is logistics and preparing the station for its future beyond [the] shuttle.”
Expedition 26 priorities include stocking the outpost with provisions, research gear and spare parts to bridge the period between the shuttle’s final mission and the startup of U.S. commercial supply deliveries.
Current scheduling includes the arrival of Japan’s HTV-2 on Jan. 27 and Russia’s 41 Progress on Jan. 31. Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-133 mission, grounded by external fuel tank cracks since early November, is tentatively scheduled to lift off for the orbiting lab on Feb. 3 with a storage module and external spare parts. ESA’s second Automated Transfer Vehicle, Johannes Kepler, is scheduled to arrive Feb. 26.
NASA’s final scheduled mission — STS-134 with Endeavour carrying the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer — was rescheduled in response to Discovery’s difficulties for no earlier than April 1.
Meanwhile, Congress is still weighing funding for an additional shuttle supply mission to the station in mid-2011, a flight aboard Atlantis designated STS-135.
Kelly, Kaleri and Skripochka are slated to depart the station in their Soyuz TMA-OM1 on March 16, leaving Kondratyev in command of the new Expedition 27.
The SpaceX Dragon, the pace car in NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, is positioned to begin station supply missions by late 2011.
Coleman and Nespoli, who are responsible for capturing and berthing the HTV-2 with the station’s robot arm, are trained for the same tasks with the Dragon. However, there is little likelihood they will get the opportunity with Dragon before their scheduled return to Earth with Kondratyev in mid-May.
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