Soyuz Blasts Off To Expand ISS Crew To Six

The Russian Soyuz Rocket shook the ground Wednesday and left a fiery tail in the sky as it left to rendezvous with the International Space Station in a mission that has been long-awaited, to increase the space lab's crew from three to six full-time crew members.

The Soyuz TMA-15 Spacecraft, which lifted off at 6:34AM EDT, holds commander Roman Romaneknko, Frank De Winne, and Robert Thirsk. The take off went according to plan, several minutes after the takeoff the spacecraft reach its orbit and had deployed its solar panels and antennas in order to achieve external power and communications.

Romanenko, a cosmonaut with the Russian Federal Space Agency, will command the crews Soyuz spacecraft through launch and docking, and serve as a flight engineer for Expeditions 20 and 21. He was selected as a test-cosmonaut candidate of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center Cosmonaut Office in December 1997. In November 1999, he was qualified as a test cosmonaut.

De Winne, a European Space Agency astronaut, will serve as a flight engineer for Expedition 20 and commander for Expedition 21. De Winne spent nine days aboard the station in 2002 as a member of the Odissea mission.

Thirsk, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut, will serve as a flight engineer for Expeditions 20 and 21. In 1996, Thirsk flew as a payload specialist astronaut aboard space shuttle mission STS-78, the Life and Microgravity Spacelab mission.

The Soyuz spacecraft will spend nearly two days catching up to the International Space Station. It should reach the ISS around 8:36AM on Friday where it will dock with the Russian Zarya module.

Friday will be the first day in the ISS history that it has had a six person crew housed within it. The doubled crew capacity is made possible by the ability for the crew to conserve water usage and greatly because of the urine and sweat recycler that the STS-125 crew help tested just last week. The recycler can recycle urine and sweat into pure drinkable water, savings NASA billions on transporting water.

NASA said that the ISS could house as many as 13 people at one time in the future, but only for a short-term and not permanently.