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14th Space Station Crew Launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome

18 September 2006

Aboard is first female spaceflight participant to visit orbiting laboratory

Washington -- Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin of the 14th International Space Station crew launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in the early morning hours of September 18 to begin a six-month stay in space.

With them is American Anousheh Ansari, the first female spaceflight participant to visit the orbiting laboratory. She is flying under contract with Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, according to a September 18 NASA press release.

Ansari will conduct a series of experiments under an agreement with the European Space Agency (ESA) and return to Earth September 28 with the Expedition 13 crew, Commander Pavel Vinogradov and NASA science officer Jeff Williams.

Lopez-Alegria, 45, will be making his fourth flight into space. He flew three space shuttle missions. On Expedition 14, he also will serve as NASA science officer.

Tyurin, 46, is making his second spaceflight. He served as a member of the station's Expedition 3 crew in 2001, which launched in August and landed in December. He is the second long-duration crewmember to be assigned to a second station expedition.

Expedition 14's Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to dock at the station early on the morning of September 20. There, the third Expedition 14 crewmember, ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter of Germany, will greet them.

Reiter arrived at the station aboard Discovery on the STS-121 mission in July. He joined Expedition 13, bringing the number of station crewmembers to three for the first time since May 2003. Expedition 13 launched to the station on March 30.

Reiter is the first ESA astronaut to serve as a long-duration space station crewmember. His presence for the first part of Expedition 14 will be valuable for his new crewmates because of his knowledge of the station and its systems. Previous oncoming crews have relied on intense handovers of just more than a week with the predecessor crewmembers before taking over station operations themselves.

Reiter, who served as a crewmember on the Russian space station Mir for six months in 1995, is scheduled to return to Earth aboard Discovery on STS-116 in December.

SHUTTLE TO BRING MORE PERSONNEL IN DECEMBER

Discovery will bring astronaut Sunita Williams to the station to replace Reiter and join Expedition 14 in progress. Williams, 41, a Navy commander, will be making her first spaceflight. She is scheduled to remain on the station until next spring.

The shuttle also will bring the P5 truss to the station. While Discovery is docked, station and shuttle crews will reconfigure the orbiting laboratory's electrical system and activate the new solar arrays brought up by Atlantis on STS-115, which is scheduled to return to Earth September 20.

Expedition 14 will do as many as four spacewalks, perhaps three in January 2007 in U.S. spacesuits, relating to station assembly. The other would be done earlier in Russian spacesuits to retrieve and install experiments.

Two Expedition 15 crewmembers are expected to arrive next spring to replace Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin.

The full text of the press release is available on the NASA Web site.

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)