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Soyuz to Take Russian, American, Spanish Astronauts to Space Station

Posted on: Friday, 17 October 2003, 06:00 CDT

Oct. 17--WASHINGTON -- A multinational trio takes off early Saturday morning from Kazakhstan, bound for the international space station -- although only two men will stay for their six-month tour.

American Michael Foale, Russian Alexander Kaleri and Spaniard Pedro Duque are scheduled to blast off in a Russian Soyuz from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1:37 a.m. EDT on Saturday.

The Soyuz will dock with the space station early Monday morning -- joining American Ed Lu and Russian Yuri Malenchenko, who have been alone on the station since early May -- and the five astronauts will spend eight days together in orbit.

The Soyuz, with Duque, Lu and Malenchenko on board, is scheduled to land at 9:36 p.m. EST on Oct. 27.

Foale and Kaleri, known as the Expedition 8 crew, will be the second pair spending an extended stay in orbit since the Feb. 1 loss of the space shuttle Columbia. After the accident, NASA and its 15 international partners agreed to scale back the crew from three to two to save supplies while keeping people on board the station.

With the remaining three shuttles grounded, the Soyuz is the only craft capable of taking astronauts to and from space. The station is being supported wholly by Russian vehicles, with Soyuz flights exchanging crews about every six months and unmanned Progress supply ships going to the station more frequently.

During their 192-day tenure on the station, Foale and Kaleri will mark two major milestones: The first, on Nov. 2, is the third anniversary of a continuous human presence on board the station. The second, in February, will be a spacewalk -- the first since the crew size was reduced and the first without an astronaut inside the station.

This is the sixth trip to space for Foale, 46, who spent 41/2 months aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1997. Kaleri, 47, also has experience with long-duration spaceflight, having been to Mir three times and spent a total of 416 days in space.

Duque, 40, who is a European Space Agency astronaut, flew on the shuttle in 1999 and will perform a number of experiments during his time on the station.

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(c) 2003. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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