14 DAY TRIAL // Last Saturday was one of the most important days for space exploration, and certainly a record-setter as far as the number of astronauts in orbit was concerned, with more than 13 people flying in zero-gravity at the same time. And all of them successfully completed their mission: Discovery landed at KSC, the ISS crew prepared the station for the new visitors, and the Soyuz TMA-14 craft docked safely aboard the orbital lab.
Although there were some last-minute problems with one of the craft's thrusters, Expedition 19 commander Gennady Padalka, who would replace NASA astronaut Michael Fincke as head of the ISS crew in a ceremony scheduled for April 2nd, managed to take manual control of the craft and dock it in one piece. “We controlled the situation all the way through. Of course we will investigate it and we will correct the algorithms of the flight,” a senior Russian space flight official said of the glitch in a briefing that took place shortly after the docking was complete.
The two vehicles made contact at 9:05 am EDT (1305 GMT), but the hatches between them were only opened at 12:36 pm EDT (1636 GMT), after the station crew managed to successfully complete a series of scientific experiments that had been already underway in the Japanese Kibo laboratory and could not be delayed. The two crews met each other with enthusiasm and hugs, one excited about the mission ahead, the other relieved and happy to finally return home.
The current commander of the ISS, Fincke, has been in space since last October, along with Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov. Their third expedition member, NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, returned safely home aboard the Discovery shuttle on Saturday, and she was replaced by JAXA colleague Koichi Wakata. Together with Padalka and NASA's Michael Barratt, they made up the crew of Expedition 19, which will be augmented in late May with three more astronauts, as the station is now ready to house a permanent six-member crew.
“Looking at the Earth, looking at our home planet from space – I will certainly be at the end of a line of hundreds of people who have done that before me, but I can't imagine anything that's going to affect me more than just seeing that from that perch,” Barratt told Space in an interview before the launch. “Don't break anything,” one of his children said to him as he reached the ISS. “I'll try not to. We're having a lot of fun, and the food's not bad either,” he replied.