The next crew of the International Space Station (ISS) began its journey to the orbiting science outpost Tuesday aboard a Soyuz spacecraft from the steppe of Kazakhstan. Known as Expedition 17, the two cosmonauts who lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome yesterday afternoon will be joined by another team member in late May. On this flight, they were accompanied by So-yeon Yi, the first South Korean astronaut in space. The three are scheduled to rendezvous with the ISS on Thursday and greet their counterparts on the current expedition.
The first two Expedition 17 members are cosmonauts: the commander, Lt. Col. Sergei Alexandrovich Volkov, and a flight engineer, Oleg Dmitrievich Kononenko, of Russia's Central Specialized Design Bureau. They will spend the next six months on the ISS working on construction of the space station.
Yi is a guest of the Russian Federal Space Agency who will conduct science missions in orbit for the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. She will return to Earth with Expedition 16 crew members, Commander Peggy Whitson and Flight Engineer Yuri Malenchenko in their own docked Soyuz on April 19. Whitson and Malenchenko have been serving aboard the ISS since last October.
When the Expedition 17 Soyuz, or TMA-12, docks at the ISS, the cosmonauts will shake hands with their new crewmate, NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, an American engineer who flew to the ISS aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in March and is scheduled to return home on the Discovery shuttle in June.
Astronaut Greg Chamitoff is scheduled to launch on the STS-124 flight of Discovery to join Expedition 17 in progress. He holds a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
