Astronaut taxi arrives on the launch pad

BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: May 26, 2014

Opening a new chapter in a tradition reaching back to the dawn of the Space Age, a Russian Soyuz rocket booster rolled out of a hangar Monday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a railroad journey to the launch pad.

The three-stage rocket is set to launch Wednesday (U.S. time) with the next three-man crew to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz launcher departed its assembly building on a railroad transporter just after sunrise Monday, arriving a few hours later atop Launch Pad No. 1, the facility where Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched on the first human spaceflight in April 1961.

Russian ground teams positioned the rocket vertical on top of the launch pad, then access platforms enclosed the Soyuz to allow technicians to complete the final preflight checklist, preparing the launcher for liftoff at 2057 GMT (3:57 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, or 1:57 a.m. local time Thursday.

Soyuz commander Maxim Suraev, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst and NASA flight engineer Reid Wiseman will climb into the Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft about three hours before launch.

Suraev, who will occupy the center seat in the Soyuz capsule, is a veteran of a 169-day spaceflight in 2009 and 2010. Gerst and Wiseman are space rookies.

The trio is scheduled to dock with the space station less than six hours after launch, beginning five-and-a-half months on the outpost before returning to Earth in mid-November

The crew will join space station commander Steve Swanson and flight engineers Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev already aboard the complex, raising the crew complement back to six members.

See our Mission Status Center for the latest news on the launch.

Photo credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky