Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

It's time for another crew exchange on the International Space Station. Tomorrow, 2 of the 6 members of Expedition 15 will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They will be traveling to the the ISS in a Soyuz spacecraft, taking 2 days to get there. They will dock on Monday to join the Expedition 14 crew and one Expedition 15 crewmember already there.

Here are the crewmembers: Fyodor Yurchikhin (ISS Commander), Oleg Kotov (Flight Engineer and Soyuz Commander) are travelling with Charles Simonyi (a "Spaceflight Participant"...i.e. a tourist) on the Soyuz. Suni Williams is already onboard the ISS as part of the Expedition 14 crew, and will become a member of Expedition 15 when the other members of E14 leave next week.

What is the significance of this event? Well, I (Travis) am the lead Motion Control Group Instructor for Expedition 15. Last month we finished training Oleg and Fyodor, since they are launching on Saturday. We are still training other members of E15: Clay Anderson and Dan Tani. Clay will replace Suni on the second Shuttle flight from now, and Dan will replace Clay a few months later on another Shuttle flight.

I'm looking forward to seeing my second Expedition crew travel to the ISS (my first was Expedition 6, but I was a Payloads instructor for that crew). Be sure to catch them launch on NASA TV at 12:30 CDT on Saturday.

Expedition 15's NASA webpage
Clay's training journal (He's a very funny dude, but his journals make him seem very "PC")

-Travis