Space station's new crew prepares for blastoff

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Space station's new crew prepares for blastoff - Sputnik International
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Three new members of the International Space Station (ISS) crew are to take off from the Baikonur Space Center on Wednesday to boost the ISS crew back to six.

Three new members of the International Space Station (ISS) crew are to take off from the Baikonur Space Center on Wednesday to boost the ISS crew back to six.

"The blastoff of the Soyuz-FG carrier with a piloted Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft is scheduled for 17:16 Moscow time [13:16 GMT] on December 21," a spokesman for the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

The ISS crew rotation schedule was disrupted after a Progress cargo ship fell on August 24. Under the initial schedule, the first three crew members were to be taken to the station in September, with the rest of the crew joining them in mid-November

A trio of ISS Expedition 30 flight engineers - NASA astronaut Don Pettit, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers will conduct about 40 scientific experiments in the orbit.

The mission's program also includes the docking of five space freighters from various states: two Russia's Progress spacecraft, a European unmanned cargo resupply spacecraft ATV-003 Edoardo Amaldi and two U.S. space freighters designed by private companies. The ISS crew members will also conduct a spacewalk.

The scientific schedule lists more than a hundred of experiments, 71 of them will be conducted under the Russian scientific program.

Pettit, Kononenko and Kuipers will join Expedition 30 commander Dan Burbank, Soyuz TMA-22 commander Anton Shkaplerov and flight engineer Anatoly Ivanishin, who arrived at the station on November 13.

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