CNN.com - Road trip for space station crew

Road trip for space station crew


The Alpha crew: Mikhail Tyurin, left, Frank Culbertson, center, and Vladimir Dezhurov

(CNN) -- It will be a short trip, but an important one. The three crew members aboard the international space station will climb aboard their Soyuz emergency escape craft early Friday and fly it around to the other side of Alpha.

U.S. commander Frank Culbertson and cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin will undock from Alpha at 6:48 a.m. EDT. The trip around the station will take about 15 minutes.

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MESSAGE BOARD: Space Exploration

The Soyuz currently is docked on the Earth-facing port of the station's Zarya module. They crew will undock from Zarya and move the Soyuz to the new Russian-built Pirs docking compartment. It will be the first-ever docking with Pirs.

The Soyuz is being moved to make way for a new one that will be launched on Sunday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The fuel on the Soyuz is only good for about six months, meaning the ships have to be routinely changed out in what NASA calls a taxi flight.

Space station Alpha

A three-person crew will bring up the new Soyuz: Commander Victor Afanasyev, flight engineer Konstantin Kozeev and French flight engineer Claudie Haignere. The three will be the first visitors for the current space station crew.

The Soyuz will blast off Sunday at around 4:59 a.m. EDT. The taxi crew will dock at the station October 23 at 6 a.m. EDT for an eight-day stay, then fly the old Soyuz back to Earth.

Space station Alpha is orbiting Earth at an average altitude of 247 statute miles (395 kilometers).

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• NASA Human Spaceflight
• EarthKAM
• The National Space Society
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