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Space station reinforcements set for launch Wednesday BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: September 25, 2013 Rocket engineers readied a Soyuz spacecraft for launch Wednesday to ferry two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut to the International Space Station.
The station has been staffed by a reduced crew of three -- Expedition 37 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and Karen Nyberg -- since mid September when two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut departed after a five-and-a-half-month stay in orbit. The Soyuz TMA-10M launch Wednesday will boost the lab crew back to six just a few days before the delayed arrival of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus cargo ship making its maiden flight. Soyuz TMA-10M commander Oleg Kotov, a space station veteran, rookie flight engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy and first-time NASA flier Michael Hopkins are scheduled for launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:58:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday (GMT-4; 2:58 a.m. Thursday local time). In keeping with recent practice, Kotov plans to oversee a four-orbit, six-hour rendezvous with the station, monitoring an automated approach and docking at the upper Poisk module around 10:48 p.m. Hopkins is the first of his 14-member 2009 astronaut class to win a flight assignment. Raised on a farm in Missouri, captain of his University of Illinois football team and an Air Force flight test engineer, Hopkins will make the climb to space strapped into the right seat of the cramped Soyuz command module. Kotov, the commander, will have the center seat with Ryazanskiy to his left. "Once it lights, I think it's going to finally hit that this is real and they're really going to put me up into space," Hopkins told CBS News in a recent telephone interview from Star City near Moscow. "I'm certainly looking forward to that! "I've got a great crew, my two Russian cosmonauts, Oleg and Sergey, are just absolutely fantastic," he added. "So I'm looking forward to sharing time with them up on orbit as well." Asked what he was looking forward to the most about life aboard the International Space Station, Hopkins said "probably the first thing is just the experience of being able to float around. I just can't imagine what it's really going to be like. "And then, obviously, the other one is to just see the Earth from that vantage point, 250 miles up. We've all seen pictures of it, but to experience it first hand I think just has to be incredible." Standing by to welcome the Soyuz TMA-10M crew aboard will be Yurchikhin, Parmitano and Nyberg, four months into their own five-and-a-half month stay in space. After bringing the new crew members up to speed on station safety procedures, the expanded Expedition 37 crew will settle in for a busy month of science operations and work to unload one cargo ship and re-load another with trash and no-longer-needed gear. Orbital Corp.'s Cygnus cargo craft, part of a commercial initiative to make up for the retirement of the space shuttle, took off on its maiden flight Sept. 18. Berthing originally was planned for Sept. 22, but the rendezvous was put on hold due to a navigation glitch. The spacecraft now is expected to arrive this weekend, pending installation of a software patch to correct the navigation issue. Amid work to unload food and other supplies from the Cygnus, the station crew will prepare a European Space Agency ATV supply craft for undocking from the Zvezda module's aft port on Oct. 28 After the ATV's departure, Yurchikhin, Parmitano and Nyberg will strap into their Soyuz TMA-09M spacecraft on Nov. 1, undock from the Rassvet module's Earth-facing port and re-dock at the port vacated by the ATV.
Normally, one three-person crew departs the station before their replacements arrive. But in this case, the Soyuz TMA-11M launch was moved up so the crew could bring an Olympic torch to the lab complex heralding the 2014 winter games in Soichi, Russia. This will be only the second time in station history that three Soyuz spacecraft and nine crew members have been aboard the lab complex at the same time. In a coincidence, Wakata was aboard during the earlier gathering in 2009. He will become the first Japanese station commander in March. Kotov and Ryazanskiy plan to take the torch outside during a spacewalk planned for Nov 9. The torch then will be brought back inside and will return to Earth with Yurchikhin, Parmitano and Nyberg. Between the Tyurin crew's arrival Nov. 7 and the Yurchikhin crew's departure four days later, the space station will host nine crew members, the most since the shuttle program's retirement. The expanded crew will have a busy few days with the torch spacewalk, a change-of-command ceremony, a joint crew news conference and, for three of them, packing for the trip home. In a pre-launch news conference Tuesday, Kotov said he and Ryazanskiy planned to take a moment during their spacewalk to talk about the torch and its significance. "Our goal here is to make it look spectacular, we would like to showcase our Olympic torch in space," he said. "So we will try to do it in a beautiful manner, I think a lot of people, actually millions of people, will be able to see it live on TV. They will see the station, they will see how we work during our spacewalks. But of course, there will be a couple of surprises." Kotov and his crewmates will still be on board when the games begin in March. He said Russian flight controllers promised to uplink events the crew might ask to see. "Of course, we won't have enough time to see everything," he said. "We'll be supporting our national teams and we'll be supporting those athletes who we like most. I'm sure that our colleagues on board the ISS will do the same and during dinners, we will be exchanging our impressions and our feelings about that." Two weeks after Yurchikhin, Parmitano and Nyberg depart aboard their Soyuz TMA-09M spacecraft, NASA and Russia will mark the 15th anniversary of the launch of the station's first module, the Russian-built, NASA-financed Functional Cargo Block, also known as Zarya. The supply and propulsion module was launched atop a Proton rocket on Nov. 20, 1998, followed two weeks later by launch of the first U.S. module, the multi-port Unity connecting node, aboard a space shuttle. Five days after the anniversary, on Nov. 25, an unmanned Russian Progress is scheduled for launch to carry supplies to the station and to test new hardware used for automated rendezvous and dockings. As part of the testing, the Progress will carry out a flyby of the station on Nov. 27 before docking at the aft port of the Zvezda command module two days later. NASA plans to close out the year with launch of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus cargo ship on Dec. 8, followed by a Russian spacewalk on Dec. 16. Hopkins said he looked forward to the busy schedule. "We have over 200 experiments that are going to get executed on the station while we're up there and that's certainly the primary role of the station and that's going to be very exciting to be a part of," Hopkins said. "A lot of the other work we do is just keeping the station running, routine maintenance. "We've got several visiting vehicles that are coming up, those are the supply vehicles, commercial vehicles, that should be arriving. And then, of course, the torch arriving. That's going to be extremely exciting. "We're going to have nine people on board the station at that time and there's going to be an EVA associated with that that's going to take the torch outside," he continued. "So it'll be very, very exciting, it's an honor to be able to participate in such an event." Along with his science and maintenance chores, Hopkins, a devoted weight lifter and physical fitness buff, will participate in NASA's "Train Like an Astronaut" program, posting regular updates and videos of his exercise aboard the station, along with tips from astronaut trainers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "I'm hoping to reach anybody and everybody I can with the physical fitness piece of it," he said. "For me, for my family, fitness, exercise, sports, it all plays a huge role. It's all about balance, too. So the work aspect, the family aspect, the rest, the exercise, it all needs to balance out. "I'd love to reach kids, because kids that start out with a healthy lifestyle, with exercise, with sports, are going to turn into adults that do the same thing. If I can reach adults and get them excited about exercising again ,or get them beyond that second week New Year's resolution to continue, I would love to do that." At the same time, he said, "I'm hoping to get people excited about space and what we're doing up there." Here is an abbreviated launch-to-docking timeline for the Soyuz TMA-10M mission (in EDT and mission elapsed time; best viewed with fixed-width font): EDT...........DD...HH...MM...SS...EVENT
09/25/13
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