Space station crew prepares to move Soyuz

A crew on the International Space Station is preparing to taxi a spacecraft from one docking port to another, making room for a robotic cargo ship to arrive later this month.

You can watch live coverage of the move here starting at 5 p.m. Click on the NASA TV still image above or on the right side of the page to launch a viewer.

Flight engineers Mike Barratt and Koichi Wakata will join Expedition 20 commander Gennady Padalka on board one of two Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station.

The American, Japanese and Russian crew members plan to move the spacecraft, dubbed TMA-14, from the station's Zvezda Service Module to the Pirs docking compartment.

The Soyuz is scheduled to undock at 5:29 p.m. EDT and take about 30 minutes to dock in its new location.

The three-seat Soyuz serve as the station's emergency escape vehicles, so three crew members must get on board in case something were to go wrong. If they could not dock again, they would have a safe passage home.

Three more station residents - Frank De Winne, Roman Romanenko and Bob Thirsk - will watch the operation from inside the station.

Their lifeboat, Soyuz TMA-15, docked to the Zarya module.