KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - A last minute bit of unplanned excitement failed to prevent the successful docking of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station today, bringing the 19th crew to take up long-term residence at the orbiting complex during a year which will see the space station grow to nearly its full potential after 11 years of complicated on-orbit assembly.
VIDEO: POST-DOCKING VIDEO FILE VIDEO: POST-DOCKING PRESS CONFERENCE VIDEO: HATCH OPENING AND WELCOMING CEREMONY VIDEO: SOYUZ DOCKS WITH THE SPACE STATION ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: WATCH THE POST-DOCKING VIDEO FILE (1200 KBPS) ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: WATCH NASA TV COVERAGE OF DOCKING (1200 KBPS) Soyuz TMA-14, carrying the ISS Expedition 19 crew of Russian cosmonaut Gannady Padalka, American astronaut Michael Barratt and spaceflight participant Charles Simonyi, docked with the space station at 9:05 a.m. EST as the two spacecraft sailed 220 miles above Central Asia. The three travelers had a few heart-stopping moments juts before docking today when the automated control system experienced problems with one of the Soyuz thrusters. Mission control ordered Padalka to override the Kurs automatic docking system a few hundred feet from the docking port and take over manual control. Padalka was able to guide the Soyuz spacecraft to a flawless docking a few minutes later. Padalka is beginning his second stint as station commander, which Barratt is making his first trip into space. Simonyi, a Hungarian-born software developer who led the creation of the Microsoft Office suite, is making history as the first space "tourist" to make two trips to orbit. He reportedly paid around $35 million to make the flight. Padalk and Barratt will replace Expedition 18 crewmembers commander Michael Fincke and flight engineer Yury Lonchakov and will join recently arrived resident Koichi Wakata from Japan to form the Expedition 19 contingent in orbit. The three spacefarers also make up the half of space station's first six-person crew. Now that the outpost has its full complement of power-generating solar arrays, an additional toilet, refrigerator and sleeping quarters as well as a functional waste water reclamation system, the time has come to increase the permanent crew size to six people for the remainder of the life of the station. On May 27, another Soyuz will blast off from the launch site in Kazakhstan carrying cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne from Belgium and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, who will join the Expedition 19 crew. For the first time, astronauts from five different nations and all of the major ISS partners will be in space and on the space station at the same time. After 10 days of handover procedures, Fincke, Lonchakov and Simonyi will undock from the station and return to Earth, landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan on April 7. (The Spacearium / Space Media Corporation)
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