International Space Station Crew Readies for September Launch
14 July 2006
Japanese businessman to spend a week at station, perform experiments
Washington -- Station assembly once again will be the main focus for International Space Station crews beginning in September, when two members of the new crew, Expedition 14, arrive after a Soyuz launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Two return-to-flight shuttle missions nearly are complete, with the shuttle Discovery set to return to Earth July 17, some 13 days after it began. These missions have focused on shuttle safety and on stemming the loss of insulation foam from the shuttle’s external tank during launch.
Now, Expedition 14 commander and science officer Mike Lopez-Alegria said during a July 13 press briefing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas, "our main theme for [the upcoming] mission is that we're going to ramp up the assembly again after the tragic loss of Columbia."
Space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew were lost in 2003 when the spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere because of a hole made during launch in one of the shuttle's wings by a piece of insulating foam from the external tank.
Lopez-Alegria, a NASA astronaut born in Spain and raised in California, has flown on shuttle missions in 1995, 2000 and 2002, and conducted five spacewalks. Other members of Expedition 14 are Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and NASA astronaut Suni Williams.
Tyurin, who will be the crew's flight engineer and Soyuz commander, is an engineering graduate of Moscow Aviation Institute. In 2001, he lived aboard the space station for 125 days.
Williams, a commander in the U.S. Navy, will be a flight engineer on expeditions 14 and 15. She will arrive for a six-month stay at the space station on the STS-116 shuttle mission scheduled for December, joining Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin and replacing European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter as a third station crewmember.
She will stay on the station until spring 2007, and Reiter will return to Earth with the STS-116 crew.
Japanese spaceflight participant Daisuke Enomoto will launch with Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin from Baikonur in September under a commercial agreement with Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency.
"I believe I was born to go to space," Enomoto said at the press briefing. "I've had a dream since I was 5 years old -- that was my motivation to go to space."
The Japanese businessman, who paid $20 million for the ride into space, will stay on the station for eight days and participate in physiology experiments developed by ESA. He will return to Earth with Expedition 13 flight engineer Jeff Williams and commander Pavel Vinogradov, now aboard the space station.
The Expedition 14 crew has an ambitious schedule, Lopez-Alegria said, that includes moving a Soyuz spacecraft from one dock to another to make room for an incoming Russian Progress unmanned freighter spacecraft, a November spacewalk in a Russian spacesuit, and three spacewalks in December and three in January 2007.
In February 2007, Lopez-Alegria added, the crew will send one unmanned Progress freighter back to Russia and receive another one loaded with new supplies, and welcome a currently planned visit by shuttle flight STS-117. In March 2007, Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin will return to Kazakstan, and Williams will stay on the space station and become part of Expedition 15.
"Clearly, we have some challenges,” Lopez-Alegia said. "I think the biggest ones are the limited time we have and all we're trying to accomplish in that time."
More information about Expedition 14 is available at the NASA Web site.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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