posted 09-29-2010 03:34 PM               

...what we call indirect crew rotation is where we have a crew of six and three of those crew members depart prior to the folks that are going to replace them arriving. So that means that, and there will be about a period of three weeks, roughly, between a departing crew departing and the next Soyuz crew arriving.

Now it's crew of six on board; we continuously have two Soyuz for the emergency escape vehicle, and usually have one more Progress, that's a cargo ship on the Russian side, and due to the number of the docking ports on the Russian side, currently it's somewhat hard to have the third Soyuz to dock to the space station. That's kind of force us to do the indirect handover: the previous crew go home and the new crew arrives so that we can cope with the limited number of docking ports on the Russian side.