Next Space Station Crew Not Sure How They'll Get Home


(Space.com) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The post-Columbia grounding of NASA's shuttle fleet has left a new crew headed for the International Space Station with no firm reservation for a ride back to Earth.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri, U.S. astronaut Michael Foale and European flight engineer Pedro Duque are slated to launch to the orbiting outpost Oct. 18 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.


Duque and the current station crew -- U.S. astronaut Ed Lu and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko -- will return to Earth eight days later aboard a Soyuz already parked at the station. But Kaleri and Foale still have no ticket for a scheduled return next April.

"We don't really know how we're going to come home," Foale said in a news conference Thursday. "Some people might say you're unwise taking a one-way trip into space, but we always do have the Soyuz vehicle that we launch on to return in."

NASA is tentatively planning to return its shuttle fleet to flight by next April. Whether NASA can shuttle Kaleri and Foale back home will depend on how swiftly it can implement recommendations of the board investigating theFeb. 1 Columbia accident. The board is expected to issue its final report, along with return-to-flight recommendations for NASA, later this month.

Kaleri and Foale will make up the second two-person crew to be launched to the International Space Station since Columbia disintegrated in the skies over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

Previous station expedition crews have comprised three people, but NASA and its international partners downsized crews after the Columbia accident to reduce the amount of supplies that had to be hauled to the outpost while its shuttles are grounded.

The current outpost tenants largely are considered a "caretaker crew," but Foale said he and his cosmonaut colleague expect to have plenty of science experiments to keep them busy during their six-month stay in space.

"I was afraid I would just be a caretaker, but that is not the case. We do have a lot of things to do," the British-born astrophysicist said. "What is extraordinary in my mind is we were looking in the past at only having a half-person a week available for science experiments when we were doing space station assembly with three people on board," he said.

Kaleri, Foale and Duque all are space veterans. The Russian cosmonaut flew three missions aboard the Mir station. Foale also served on Mir and is a veteran of four other shuttle missions.

Duque, a European Space Agency astronaut, flew on the shuttle in 1998. His famous crewmate: John Glenn.