{"id":14452,"date":"2017-07-27T23:02:59","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T15:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/soyuz-crew-set-for-friday-launch-to-space-station\/"},"modified":"2017-07-27T23:02:59","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T15:02:59","slug":"soyuz-crew-set-for-friday-launch-to-space-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/soyuz-crew-set-for-friday-launch-to-space-station\/","title":{"rendered":"Soyuz crew set for Friday launch to space station"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"\"
Paolo Nespoli, Sergey Ryazanskiy and Randy Bresnik pose for a picture after a crew news conference Thursday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA\/Joel Kowsky<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Launch of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Friday carrying three fresh crew members to the International Space Station will boost the lab\u2019s crew back to six and, most important from NASA\u2019s perspective, dramatically boost research with four crew members \u2014 three NASA astronauts and a veteran European flier \u2014 available to operate experiments in the American segment of the laboratory.<\/p>\n

Soyuz MS-05 commander Sergey Ryazanskiy, NASA flight engineer Randy \u201cKomrade\u201d Bresnik and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli, are scheduled for launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 11:41 a.m. EDT Friday (GMT-4; 9:41 p.m. local time), roughly the moment Earth\u2019s rotation carries the pad into the plane of the space station\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n

With a doctorate in biomedicine, Ryazanskiy spent 166 days aboard the station in 2013-14 and he is the first scientist-cosmonaut to serve as a Soyuz commander. He also commanded one of three international crews during a 500-day simulated Mars mission in 2009.<\/p>\n

\u201cSergey is the first scientist-commander of the Soyuz and with his Mars experience and just the good character of the person he is, he\u2019s been an outstanding commander for us to prepare for our flight,\u201d Bresnik said.<\/p>\n

An F\/A-18 TOPGUN graduate with more than 6,000 hours flying high-performance aircraft, Bresnik will serve as flight engineer in the left seat of the Soyuz during launch and landing. He spent 10 days in space as a shuttle crew member during a 2009 space station assembly mission.<\/p>\n

In an interesting bit of trivia, Bresnik\u2019s grandfather was Amelia Earhart\u2019s photographer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t be here today if it wasn\u2019t for Ameila Earhart,\u201d Bresnik said in a NASA interview. \u201cIt turns out my grandfather was her photographer for five years before her (ill-fated around-the-world) record attempt in 1937. He was supposed to accompany her on the flight, but in the end, she ended up taking extra fuel instead of him and his equipment.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that simple decision in 1937, because my father was born in 1938, meant that had he gone on that flight, I wouldn\u2019t be here today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Filling out the Soyuz MS-05 crew is Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, making his third spaceflight. He first flew aboard the shuttle Discovery during a 2007 station assembly flight and then completed a long-term stay aboard the outpost in 2010-11, pushing his total time in space to 174 days.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to be an astronaut since I was a kid,\u201d he said. After a long stint in the Italian army, serving as a master parachutist, jump master and special forces operator, he \u201ceventually picked up again this childhood dream and got a degree in aerospace engineering and then worked for the European Space Agency. Then (I was) fortunate enough in 1998 to be selected as a European astronaut.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
The Soyuz rocket topped by the Soyuz MS-05 spaceship arrived Wednesday at its launch pad at Baikonur. Credit: Energia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the time of launch, the space station will be flying over the northeast border of Kazakhstan, about 1,130 miles ahead of the Soyuz. If all goes well, Ryazanskiy and Bresnik will oversee an automated four-orbit rendezvous with the laboratory, moving in for docking at the Earth-facing Rassvet port around 6 p.m.<\/p>\n

They will be welcomed aboard by Expedition 52 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, flight engineer Jack Fischer and Peggy Whitson, NASA\u2019s most experienced astronaut with 629 days in orbit (as of Friday) during three missions, including two stints as commander.<\/p>\n

The combined crew will include four astronauts assigned to the U.S. segment of the station \u2014 Fischer, Whitson, Bresnik and Nespoli \u2014 and two in the Russian segment \u2014 Yurchikhin and Ryazanskiy.<\/p>\n

The station crew normally is evenly split between the Russians and the U.S. segment, which includes astronauts representing NASA, ESA, Japan and Canada. But the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos recently decided to downgrade to two crew members to save money in the near term and that opened up a Soyuz seat for a USOS \u2014 U.S. orbital segment \u2014 astronaut.<\/p>\n

With the arrival of the Soyuz MS-05 crew, an additional USOS crew member will be available to carry out research.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am excited about having a full complement of people up here who can really utilize this amazing laboratory,\u201d Fischer, who\u2019s been aboard the station since April 20, said in an interview with CBS News.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis will be the first time where we have four USOS, we\u2019re have three Americans and an Italian, Paolo, working on the U.S. segment on science. Four people. That\u2019s crazy talk! I\u2019m super excited about how much science we\u2019re going to be able to get done with all four people. So, overall, it\u2019s awesome, I cannot wait for them to get up here and cannot wait for the discoveries that we make together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bresnik agreed, calling the expanded USOS crew \u201ca huge improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll get a taste of it when we launch because Paolo Nespoli and I will be up there with (Jack) and Peggy, who\u2019ve been working their tails off since June 2 when they\u2019ve been by themselves (in the U.S. segment). So we\u2019ll have about five or six weeks together, the four of us, and hopefully we\u2019ll learn the ropes from them really well and then just dovetail into four crew members in increment 53.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t really have an idea how to quantify that yet,\u201d he added. \u201cIs it really just a fourth body and we\u2019re adding 25 percent more capability? Or, we\u2019re able to do all the maintenance and other stuff that we normally do and this person could be, theoretically, book-kept as all utilization. So we may double our capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ryazanskiy said having only two Russian crew members aboard will require some Russian research to be carried out in their spare time, but he does not anticipate any problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will be really busy because there will only be two of us,\u201d he said. \u201cI have a lot of science that is now going on the task list so some experiments will be done in my free time aboard the station. But overall, for life support and technical issues, two Russian crew members will be enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitson, who holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry, was launched to the station last November and originally planned to return to Earth in early June with her Soyuz MS-03 crewmates Oleg Novitskiy and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet. But the Russian decision to reduce its crew complement left an open seat on the Soyuz MS-04 spacecraft that carried Yurchikhin and Fischer into orbit April 20.<\/p>\n

As a result, NASA and Roscosmos agreed to extend Whitson\u2019s mission and she will return to Earth with Yurchikhin and Fischer aboard the MS-04 spacecraft on Sept. 3. The mission extension will push her total time in space to 666 days, moving her up to eighth in the world just behind Yurchikhin, who will rank seventh.<\/p>\n

Ryazanskiy, Bresnik and Nespoli face an intense first few weeks aboard the station with a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship scheduled to arrive in mid August, a spacewalk by Yurchikhin and Ryazanskiy on Aug. 17, plans to photograph the Aug. 21 solar eclipse from orbit, the departure of Yurchikhin and his crewmates Sept. 3 and the arrival of a fresh crew \u2014 one Russian and two Americans \u2014 on Sept. 13.<\/p>\n

Ryazanskiy, Bresnik and Nespoli are scheduled to return to Earth Dec. 14. They will be replaced Dec. 27 by another crew made up of one Russian and two Americans.<\/p>\n

The solar eclipse is generating widespread interest, the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 99 years. Bresnik said the station crew will be able to monitor the eclipse over three orbits and plans to downlink video and still images.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll have, actually, three passes,\u201d Bresnik told CBS News in a pre-launch interview from Moscow. \u201cThe first one \u2026 is when we\u2019re over the southern Pacific, and we\u2019ll be on the lookout. Then on the second pass, we (are) over the top of Lake Huron when we\u2019ll be able to see it the best. We\u2019ll be there with video cameras and our big telephoto lenses to take pictures.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then, we\u2019ll be able to see it on a third orbit, out over the Atlantic Ocean, where we\u2019ll have about an 85 percent obscuration of the sun. We\u2019ve got special filters for the cameras to take those pictures. We\u2019ll share it right away with everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his part, Ryazanskiy said he is looking forward taking photos in general and sharing them via social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really like to make photos,\u201d he told reporters earlier this year. \u201cFrom a previous mission, I (took) more than 65,000 photos. Nowadays, I\u2019m working on a book with photos and stories. Personally, I prefer Instagram because it\u2019s easier to share your visual experiences. Now we have so many different social media channels, I will try to use the most popular.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said his sister will help him get his pictures on line.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really important and really necessary to try to share all these wonderful things you can see from above,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes, it\u2019s impossible even with photos because it\u2019s much more beautiful or three dimensional. But still, we should try, we should try to share our experience with other people who maybe in the future will be able to fly in space.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Paolo Nespoli, Sergey Ryazanskiy and Randy Bresnik pose for a picture after a crew news conference Thursday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA\/Joel Kowsky Launch of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Friday carrying three fresh crew members to the International Space Station will boost the lab\u2019s crew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1601,831,3193,3101,1545,717,2188,1771],"class_list":["post-14452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-baikonur-cosmodrome","tag-european-space-agency","tag-expedition-52","tag-expedition-53","tag-human-spaceflight","tag-international-space-station","tag-italy","tag-kazakhstan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14452"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}