Tugged along a historic route leading to the launch pad where Yuri Gagarin took off 1961 to become the first person in space, a Soyuz rocket rolled out of its assembly hangar in Kazakhstan and stood up on its launch mount Sunday.<\/p>\n
The photos below show the rollout at dawn, two days before the Soyuz rocket\u2019s scheduled launch at 1103:10 GMT (6:03:10 a.m. EST) Tuesday with a three-man crew heading for the International Space Station.<\/p>\n
Yuri Malenchenko, beginning his sixth space mission, will be in the commander\u2019s seat of the Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft. NASA astronaut Tim Kopra \u2014 on his second spaceflight \u2014 will sit to Malenchenko\u2019s left acting as Soyuz flight engineer, and rookie European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake will ride in the right seat.<\/p>\n
The launch is set for 5:03 p.m. local time at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Central Asia launch base under a long-term lease by the Russian government.<\/p>\n
The capsule will deploy in orbit less than nine minutes later, unfurl its solar panels and navigation antennas, then begin a series of engine firings to match the space station\u2019s trajectory, setting up for a docking to the lab\u2019s Rassvet module at 1724 GMT (12:24 p.m. EST).<\/p>\n
The Soyuz docking will raise the station\u2019s crew size back to six, with the fresh crewmen joining commander Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov.<\/p>\n