Soyuz launch will return ISS to full staff

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A multinational crew plans to rocket to the International Space Station this week, fully staffing the outpost before the arrival early next year of the first commercial spaceship to visit the complex.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko will be at the controls when a Soyuz FG rocket blasts off Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Flying with him: U.S. astronaut Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers of the European Space Agency.

The trio will arrive at the station Friday.

"I told my family it's like going back home, or at least my second home," said Pettit, a 56-year-old married father of two who spent six months on the outpost in late 2002 and early 2003.

It also will mark a key milestone for the chemical engineer who began his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1983.

"I was there 13 years," Pettit said. "And I find it interesting that I worked the early part of my career at a national laboratory, and now I'm going back into space on the space station, and again, it's a national laboratory asset. So in some respects I've gone a full circle while I'm going in circles around the Earth."

Pettit, Kononenko and Kuipers comprise the second half of a crew conducting the 30th expedition to the international outpost. U.S. astronaut Dan Burbank and two Russian cosmonauts -- Anatoly Ivanishin and Anton Shkaplerov -- already are onboard.

The arrival of Pettit and his two colleagues will bring the station back to full staff. An Aug. 24 Soyuz rocket launch failure and the subsequent investigation resulted in a halving of the station's crew for the better part of the past four months.

"There's a whole cadre of experiments just waiting to be done on space station, and basically, crew time is the limiting factor right now," Pettit said. "So as soon as I get on space station, I'll be rolling up my sleeves and jumping into the lab and starting to do a number of these scientific experiments."

The Expedition 30 crew will perform dozens of experiments, many of which will focus on how the human body adapts to living and working in the weightless space environment -- work considered key to preparing for future missions beyond Earth orbit.

The astronauts and cosmonauts also will be onboard for a test flight that will open a new era of commercial resupply services.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon spacecraft are tentatively scheduled to launch Feb. 7 on a mission to demonstrate the capability to safely and reliably deliver cargo to the space station. After blasting off from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the Dragon spacecraft will fly within 30 feet of the station.

With Pettit by his side, Burbank will use a 57.5-foot robot arm to grapple the spacecraft and then berth the Dragon to the Earth-facing port on the U.S. Harmony module.

If all goes well, the test flight will clear the way for SpaceX to begin launching resupply missions to the station later next year. The Hawthorne, Calif., company holds a $1.6 billion contract to launch 12 cargo missions to the outpost.

Taurus rocket maker Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., holds a $1.9 billion contract to launch eight cargo resupply missions with its new Cygnus spacecraft.

"I view these vehicles like wagon trains supplying some government-run fort out West, and it doesn't matter whose wagon train it is. What's important is that the wagon train eventually makes it to the fort," Pettit said.

The U.S. commercial cargo carriers will join robotic Russian Progress, European ATV and Japanese HTV spacecraft in delivering cargo to the station.

Pettit, Kononenko and Kupiers will return to Earth in May.