Roscosmos cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and NASA astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Shannon Walker are now International Space Station-bound after lifting off at 4:35:19 p.m. CDT Tuesday onboard Soyuz TMA-19 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Credit: NASA TV
On course to dock on Thursday evening with the orbiting lab, the TMA-19 crew's flight marks the 100th launch to the ISS (34 space shuttles, 37 Progress, one HTV, one ATV, four Russian modules and 23 Soyuz).
Once at the station, Yurchikhin, Wheelock and Walker will join their Expedition 24 counterparts Alexander Skvortsov, Mikhail Kornienko and Tracy Caldwell Dyson for half of their five-and-a-half-month stay and then will lead the 25th increment crew until November.
Credit: NASA TV
Launched from the same pad and on the same date (by local time) as the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, 47 years ago, Walker, 45, is the 55th female enter orbit and the first United States astronaut native to Houston, Texas, home of the Johnson Space Center, Mission Control and NASA's training facilities.
When Walker joins Caldwell Dyson on the ISS, the two will represent the most women serving together on a long-duration station crew in history.
Credit: NASA TV
The first active member of the U.S. Army to live on the station, Col. Wheelock, 50, is making his second trip into space and his second visit to the ISS. As an STS-120 mission specialist aboard space shuttle Discovery in 2007, he conducted three spacewalks.
Yurchikhin, 51, is making his third trip into space and his second long-duration stay aboard the station. He flew on space shuttle Atlantis' STS-112 mission in October 2002 and spent six months aboard the station in 2007 as commander of Expedition 15.
Yurchikhin's Soyuz call sign is "Olympus."