NASA astronaut Catherine "Cady" Coleman is celebrating her 50th birthday today, one day before a planned blastoff to a long-duration stay on the International Space Station. The retired Air Force colonel on Wednesday will join Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli and Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev inside a Soyuz spacecraft scheduled to blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2:09 p.m. EST.
The Expedition 26 crew members are expected to dock at the International Space Station at 3:12 p.m. EST Friday, restoring the station to its full six-person capacity and starting a roughly five-month tour on the outpost.
You can watch live coverage of both events here by clicking on the NASA TV box at right to launch a video player.
The flight is the first in more than 11 years for Coleman, who joined NASA in 1992 and flew on shuttle Columbia in 1995 and 1999.
"This is for Cady the culmination of a dream, a lifetime of preparation," Coleman's husband, glass artist Josh Simpson, said in an interview aired on NASA TV. "I think she’s ready. Knowing my wife, she’ll be packing right until the last instant before she goes on board."
Nespoli will be visiting the station for the second time, after a 2007 mission aboard shuttle Discovery that delivered the Harmony node and relocated the Port 6 truss solar arrays. Kondratyev is making his first spaceflight.
A three-stage Soyuz rocket carrying the crew's Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft was raised on its launch pad Monday at Baikonur. The launch was delayed five days because the descent module on the Soyuz was damaged during transporation to the launch site and had to be replaced by one from another vehicle.
IMAGE: At the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Dec. 11, (from left) NASA astronaut Catherine (Cady) Coleman, Expedition 26 flight engineer; Soyuz commander Dmitry Kondratyev of Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli, flight engineer, stop for a photo at completion of final fit check in the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Victor Zelentsov
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