14 DAY TRIAL // Officials from the Soyuz Mission Control center near Moscow have just announced that the TMA-15 spacecraft, carrying the other half of the Expedition 20 crew, managed a perfect launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and reached its designated orbit at about 200 to 242 kilometers (120 to 150 miles) above the Earth. “The space ship Soyuz TMA-15 has now safely entered the designated orbit,” an official from the Russian space agency RosCosmos said, quoted by Reuters.
NASA has informed that the launch took place at 6:34 am EDT (10:34 GMT), and that everything went according to plan. The three astronauts aboard the Soyuz space capsule include RosCosmos Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko, ESA Astronaut Frank De Winne from Belgium, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) member Robert Thirsk. The three will join Russian ISS Commander Gennedy Padalka, and Flight Engineers Michael Barratt (NASA) and Koichi Wakata (JAXA), who are already aboard the International Space Station, and, together, they will form the first six-astronaut crew aboard the station, Expedition 20.
The three cosmonauts that went to orbit today will stay aboard the ISS for roughly six months, and De Winne will replace Gennedy Padalka as the commander of the facility at one point, when the Russian returns home. Until that moment, the ISS will meet its first complete crew on Friday, featuring members from the United States, the European Union, the Russian Federation, Canada and Japan. Flight engineer Koichi Wakata, who was JAXA's first long-term astronaut aboard the space station, will be replaced by another NASA astronaut in June, and will return home aboard the shuttle Endeavor, on mission STS-127.
“At this time we will have Canadian, Russian, American, European and Japanese guy[s] on board space station, and I would say it's [an] outstanding event. You know that all these countries have been participating in [the] ISS project for 10 years as a minimum, and now it's pretty high time to have all these astronauts and cosmonauts together working in space,” the Commander of the Expedition 19/20 crew, Russian Astronaut Gennedy Padalka, said in a pre-flight interview, quoted by Space.