Soyuz TMA-15 Will Take Off Today

At 6:34 am EDT (1034 GMT) today, the Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft, carrying the three astronauts that will join the Expedition 19 crew on the International Space Station (ISS), will take off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan. For the first time since work started on the space facility, it will be able to house a permanent six-member crew, which means that Expedition 20, made up from the people launching today and those already in orbit, will be the first complete one to take residence in space. Featuring astronauts from five different countries, it represents the crowning achievement of efforts spanning more than a decade.

Today's launch will see astronauts Roman Romanenko (RosCosmos), Frank De Winne (Belgium, ESA), and Robert Thirsk (Canadian, CSA) launching for the ISS aboard a Soyuz capsule. They are scheduled to dock on the orbital lab on Friday, if all goes according to plan. Over the past few weeks, the crew aboard the facility has prepared intensely for this visit, which will see members of NASA, ESA, RosCosmos, JAXA and CSA living on the station together for the first time.

“At this time we will have Canadian, Russian, American, European and Japanese guy on board space station, and I would say it's [an] outstanding event. You know that all these countries have been participating in 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. The cosmonaut will remain in charge of the assembled Expedition 20 crew, when they reach the ISS two days from now.

“When we all get together at the table we will see that we are people from all corners of the world, working together as a single team to execute our mission program, and I want to believe that we will be able to find a common language and that we will all be happy to be part of this family,” Romanenko added in an interview he gave to the American space agency. The station is now able to house six permanent residents because its water recycling system finally came online last week.

When Padalka returns home in October, Frank de Winne will become the station's commander. “This is the first for Europe that there will be an ESA astronaut commanding the International Space Station, and that's of course very important for ESA, our European agency, which has invested a lot in the International Space Station,” the astronaut explained.