14 DAY TRIAL // After some six months spent aboard the International Space Station (ISS), RosCosmos astronaut Gennadi Padalka, the acting commander of the outpost, and NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, a flight engineer, are now undergoing preparations to depart this Saturday. They will fly to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 capsule, on October 10. After undocking, they are expected on the ground in less than three and a half hours, mission controllers say.
Guy Laliberte, who may very well be the last space tourist for the foreseeable future, will accompany them back to Earth, after spending about a week aboard the space lab. Before departing, Padalka will surrender his command to ESA astronaut Frank De Winne, who will officially be in charge of Expedition 21. Barratt and Padalka's departure will also conclude Expedition 20. Their place will be taken by flight engineers Jeff Williams (NASA) and Maxim Suraev (RosCosmos), who arrived last week aboard the ISS on the Soyuz TMA-16 space capsule.
The rest of the Expedition 21 crew will be made up of flight engineers Nicole Stott (NASA), Roman Romanenko (RosCosmos) and Robert Thirsk, of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). Today, the two departing crew members ran tests on the motion control system of the Soyuz TMA-14 craft, which will carry them home. The capsule launched atop a Soyuz-FG delivery system from the Gagarin's Start launch pad at the Cosmodrome, on March 26, carrying Padalka, Barratt, and space tourist Charles Simonyi, the former head of Microsoft's application software group.
Yesterday, some of the astronauts also participated in an interview for Fox News Radio and the St. Petersburg Times, in which they spoke about numerous things related to life as an astronaut. They talked about their feelings when they were first announced that they would serve on the ISS, and also provided details of how the international partners in the $100-billion ISS cooperated to achieve the stated goals of the mission, Space Fellowship reports.