The crew of the International Space Station just doubled after the arrival of a U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts.With Alexander Kalery at the controls, the Soyuz spacecraft docked at the outpost at 8:01 p.m., capping a two-day trip from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. His crewmates: American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka.
Kalery, Kelly and Skripochka will join U.S. astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Shannon Walker, and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yutchikhin, onboard the station.
The arriving crew will spend the next couple of hours making certain there is an air-tight seal between the spacecraft before hatches are opened. A welcome ceremony is scheduled for 11:01 p.m. You can watch that event live here in The Flme Trench. Click the NASA TV box on the right to launch our NASA TV viewer and refresh this page for periodic updates.
4 comments:
The U.S. Astronauts better get used to riding those Soyuz.. that will be the only U.S. path to manned space after the Shuttle program gets shut down.
Thanks Obama this is on you.
S. from Montr.
Pres. Obama said, BEEN THERE, DONE DAT. when he tried to justi-
fie is dicision to cancel the Moon program. But the point is
misplaced because the equipement does not existe anymore, and
Constellation was going to give the U.S. back these technolo-
gies. So he is missing the big picture, whitch is not just to
provide jobs, but jobs that keep America safe and strong. I
would submit to you all, at least to him and is misguided con- cellors that such jobs are as valuable to nationnal security as any in the other sectors of the aerospace industry.
But if I do agree in part with the first two comments, we should not forget that the decision to invade Irak diverted mush of the funding that should have gone to the programs
for NASA. Look Is know and realise that most of the people
who will read my comment may have agreed with that choice,
that Pres Bush made, but for NASA s future, it was a bad one.
All of that being said or pointed out, still whit the troops
from Irak mostly coming home, it would not have taken so mush
more money to properly finance the Constellation efforts, with
some severe contract rules on the companies involved to mitiga-
te most of the cost overruns. anything is possible.
Obama just does not care about space.
Canceling the Shuttle was Bush's biggest mistake; after 30 years it is working safely and efficiently, and he committed our community to years without jobs or launches even if Constellation was fully funded, which he refused to do. Apollo was canceled in 1974 by Nixon because sending people to the moon with expendable rockets was much too expensive to be practical. It still is. That's why we built the Shuttle.
In the future the Griffin/Bush years will be remembered as a disaster. To go to the moon, or even to LEO, we need much lower costs, as Nixon demanded. This can only be achieved with fully reusable systems.
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