A new space station crew blasted into space through clear blue skies today from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz spacecraft carried Expedition 17 crew members Sergei Volkov, who will be the new station Commander, and Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko. They were joined by South Korean space tourist So-yeon Yi, who at age 29 is the youngest woman ever to fly in space. Volkov is the son of veteran cosmonaut Alexander Volkov.

Source: NASA TV

Unlike NASA, Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, provides live TV pictures of the crew in the cockpit during the ascent into space. So-yeon Yi could be seen with a broad smile on her face, repeatedly giving the “thumbs-up” sign to the camera.

Once in space, it takes the Soyuz a couple of days to “catch up” to the International Space Station, so docking will not happen until Thursday.

Meanwhile, Expedition 16 crew members Peggy Whitson and Yuri Malenchenko are preparing to wrap up their six-month tour of duty and will return to Earth with So-yeon Yi in the Soyuz on April 19. Expedition 16 Flight Engineer Garrett Reisman will remain in orbit and become part of the Expedition 17 crew. Commander Whitson was the first female station Commander and oversaw one of the busiest periods to date in space station assembly.

The Expedition 17 crew is expecting visitors in early June when astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery come calling to deliver and install another piece of the Japanese Kibo Module to the station. After that, things will quiet down for a while in terms of station assembly, while the shuttle program turns its attention to flying the final Hubble servicing mission, currently targeted for October.

–Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology

Sixteen days ago the Space Shuttle Endeavour blasted off from Kennedy Space Center into the night sky. Its return Wednesday also came under the cover of darkness.

Source: NASA

The shuttle’s first opportunity to land at KSC was slated for just before sunset, but the weather didn’t cooperate. NASA mission managers called off the attempt because of concerns over clouds in the area.

The next chance to land was after dark and still at risk of being too cloudy. Shuttle Astronauts train for night landings, but they can be more difficult. Before Wednesday only 21 had been done in the shuttle program’s history.

We waited in the press center for the latest from NASA’s weather experts. Meanwhile over our heads an astronaut flew the shuttle flight path in a special aircraft designed to simulate the shuttle’s reactions in the weather conditions. In Houston NASA mission control poured over the latest weather readings. If they “waved off” the shuttle on this landing attempt the orbits wouldn’t line up for another chance to land at KSC until the next day.

After what clearly were serious discussions, and a conversation with Endeavour Commander Dom Gorie, NASA managers made the final call. They asked the shuttle flight crew to fire the engines slowing the orbiter to begin its decent.

As the shuttle worked its way down over the Yucatan peninsula, we stood at the CNN live location and watched its path on a monitor. The first sign of the shuttle entering the area were two loud bangs in quick succession. The noises sounded a bit like fireworks but were actually the nose and tail of the shuttle crossing the sound barrier. We kept our eyes glued on the night sky but from our vantage point the only sight of the shuttle visible was on our TV monitors.

As we watched the live feeds a bright orange flame pulsed from the top of Endeavor near its tail. The bright flame looked alarming - but was actually nothing to be concerned about. The fire is part of the exhaust from the shuttle’s auxiliary power unit. It actually shows up on every flight, but is much more apparent when it’s dark out.

Thursday the Shuttle astronauts will head back to the landing strip to catch a plane home to Houston. That flight is scheduled for the afternoon - not in the black of night.

-CNN Producer Aaron Cooper at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida

Executing a perfect back flip is typically best left to a gymnast, or maybe a platform diver. But on Wednesday evening it will astronaut Dom Gorie’s turn show us his stuff. Piloting the space shuttle Endeavour on final approach to dock with the International Space Station, Commander Gorie will nudge the shuttle into what’s called the Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver, or RPM.

Commander Rick Sturckow at the controls of Atlantis executes a Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver. Source: NASA

Check out a video of the STS-114 RPM here.

Here’s how it works: Ever since it launched early Tuesday, Endeavour has been on course to rendezvous with the space station on Flight Day 3. During the day on Wednesday, the shuttle crew will fire the shuttle’s thrusters periodically to ease up to the station, approaching from behind and below. When they reach a point about 600 feet below the ISS, Gorie will start the maneuver on cue. It takes about 9 minutes for the entire 360 degree flip to play out.

While Endeavour’s underside is exposed to the ISS, station crew members will use digital cameras equipped with 400mm and 800mm lenses to shoot as many as 300 photographs of the delicate heat resistant tiles that cover the shuttle’s belly. Those images will be downlinked to the ground later in the day, where teams of experts will pour over them, looking for any signs of damage that may have been caused by flying debris during launch and ascent to space.

The technique was developed in the wake of the Columbia accident in 2003. An investigation board determined that debris hit that shuttle’s heat shield during launch, cracking a gash in the wing. When Columbia reentered the atmosphere to land, searing hot gases seeped in, incinerating the spacecraft. Seven astronauts died.

In the aftermath, NASA engineers made a number of modifications to both their hardware and their procedures. And so the RPM was conceived. It was first flown by Commander Eileen Collins on the STS-114 return to flight mission in 2005, and it has been flown on every subsequent mission. Here’s a little gallery for you: STS-114, STS-121, STS-115, STS-116, STS-117, STS-118, STS-120, and STS-122.

NASA TV will carry Endeavour’s RPM live at 10:20pm Eastern on Wednesday, if you want to watch.

–Kate Tobin, Sr. Producer, CNN Science & Technology

For a few dozen seconds early Tuesday morning the darkness of night turned into what looked like day at the Kennedy Space Center.

NASA Image

At 2:28 a.m. Launch Complex 39 - including the huge vehicle assembly building and the neighboring press center - were relatively dark. The parking lot lights had been turned off for the launch. Clouds obscured the moon and the stars. In the distance - about 3 miles away - huge flood lights made a giant X in the sky as they illuminated the space shuttle Endeavour sitting on its launch pad.

As the press center’s giant countdown clock ticked down, NASA commentators calmly called out the remaining seconds over loud speakers - “3 - 2 - 1.” The first sign something was happening on the pad was the smoke that billowed from the sides of the rockets. Quickly a bright light emerged as the more than 4 million pound “stack” of the orbiter, the external fuel tank and the solid rocket boosters silently lifted into the sky. The bright light in their wake looked almost like a sunrise — in high speed.

The next part of the launch experience was the rattle of the engines. Seconds after seeing the bright light the sound of the rockets reached the press site. First there was a soft rattle that grew louder and louder. At full volume you could feel the vibrations as the sound waves slammed into your body. The sound was so intense that car alarms in the parking lot start to go off.

As the shuttle continued to rise into the night sky the area around the press center grew brighter and brighter. At full intensity it became so bright you would think the sun was out. Then almost as quickly as the light dawned the shuttle slipped into the clouds. The rockets illuminated them from above and then rapidly dimmed as the shuttle rocketed away.

There is nothing quite like a space shuttle launch up close… and that’s doubly true for a night launch.

–CNN Producer Aaron Cooper at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida

Crews have been manning the International Space Station continuously since late 2000, and in all that time there have really only been three ways to get supplies from Earth to orbit. They can go up in the space shuttle’s cargo hold, they can be packed into an unmanned Russian “Progress” re-supply ship, or they can be squeezed in with passengers on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Source: ESA

That is, until now. If all goes as planned, a new European supply ship called the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is set to launch on Saturday night atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the Ariane Launch Complex Number 3 in Kourou, French Guiana.

Christened “Jules Verne,” this unmanned spacecraft will be the first of five ATV’s launched to the ISS at a rate of one every year and a half or so.

It is designed to deliver more than 8 tons of cargo to the ISS — everything from food and drinking water to air, propellants and scientific equipment.

Once docked to the Russian Zvezda Service Module on the station, the ATV will remain there for about 6 months. From time to time, flight controllers will fire its rocket thrusters to boost the ISS to a higher altitude, as the station’s orbit naturally degrades over time.

After crew members unpack it, they will gradually fill it back up with trash. After it undocks, it will be programmed for a controlled reentry to the atmosphere, and should burn up completely over the Pacific Ocean.

This maiden flight of the ATV comes just a month after shuttle Atlantis astronauts delivered and installed the station’s European Columbus laboratory. And, if all goes as planned, the ISS will expand again next week when astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour arrive with the first piece of the Japanese Kibo laboratory.

The “Jules Verne” launch is scheduled for 11:03pm Eastern on Saturday, March 8. NASA TV is planning live coverage.

–Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology

They’re not JUST rocket scientists.
Outfitting the International Space Station also requires skills more typical of auto mechanics or construction workers.

Mission Specialist Robert Behnken is scheduled to make three complicated spacewalks, or EVAs, (extravehicular activity) during the Shuttle Endeavour’s 16 day mission.
“A lot of the EVA that we do is high tech Do It Yourself kind of work. I would say to anyone who asks, ‘who would make a good spacewalker?’ I’d say, you know the guy that you know that you trust to change the brakes on the front and back of your car, that guy would probably make a pretty good spacewalker. If you trust him with your car to do that, he can probably do what we do,” said Behnken.
The big difference doing it while orbiting the earth?
“You have to wear big bulky gloves,” he laughed.
The seven shuttle astronauts on STS-123 who will soon deliver the first element of the Japanese Kibo laboratory to the space station talked with reporters at the Johnson Space Center in Houston this week.
Because European Space Agency astronaut Hans Schlegel missed a spacewalk from the shuttle Atlantis last month, I asked the astronauts about the seldom- discussed possibility of space sickness.
Veteran astronaut Takao Doi from the Japanese Space Agency JAXA gave me this Zen-like answer:
“I can say that space is a very gentle place. So when you go up there for the first time the body gets surprised because it is different, it is zero gravity so the body starts adapting to the new environment. Don’t fight it. Just let your body adjust by itself and you won’t have a problem,” said Doi.
He said a day or two is usually enough to get in tune with microgravity– but longer if you start fighting it!
There will be seven “human” astronauts aboard STS-123. But another passenger, a robot known as “Dextre,” could someday take over some of the difficult dangerous tasks that astronauts now do on spacewalks. Veteran spacewalker Rick Linnehan, also scheduled to make three EVAs on the mission, is pretty impressed by Dextre.
“When I was a kid I used to watch “Astro Boy” and “Gigantor”, they were Japanese animations. And this thing [Dextre] looks like “Gigantor, the Space Age Robot.” I try to think of something people can identify with, we’ve got this giant robot with these giant arms, that’s going to be climbing around on station and pulling things in and out and popping boxes, kind of like a giant R2D2. That’s the best way i can describe it,” said Linnehan.
Both Linnehan and Mission Specialist Garrett Reisman also talked about how space exploration may give a different glimpse of how human actions such as pollution and deforestation impact the planet.
“Everyone comes back with a new appreciation for our planet and how fragile it is, and our role as stewards of the environment. As far as collecting data and learning how to anticipate what will happen to our environment and what is the impact that humans are having on our environment, space offers probably the best platform to make those observations,” said Reisman.
He will be staying on the space station, while European Space Agency astronaut Leopold Eyharts will return to earth with the other six Endeavour crew members.

Marsha Walton, producer, CNN Science and Technology

Unless technical problems crop up or last-minute bad weather presents itself, the shuttle Endeavour will rocket into space in a dramatic night launch at 2:28am ET on Tuesday March 11.

Shuttle Endeavour rolls out to launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on February 18, 2008

That’s the word from NASA managers who wrapped up Endeavour’s flight readiness review today at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and officially cleared the shuttle to fly.

Endeavour astronauts will deliver and install the first of several components of the Japanese laboratory complex to the International Space Station, as well as a Canadian-built robotic arm called Dextre.

The 16-day mission, designated STS-123, will be the longest shuttle visit to date to the International Space Station. It will be the 122nd shuttle flight, the 21^st flight of Endeavour, the 25th shuttle mission to the ISS, the 97^th post-Challenger mission, the ninth post-Columbia mission, and there will be 12 more shuttle flights (including this one) remaining in the shuttle program before NASA retires the fleet in 2010.

The Endeavour astronauts, led by Commander Dom Gorie, will conduct five spacewalks to install the new hardware, tinker with a malfunctioning rotating solar array, and test tile repair techniques.

Endeavour’s mission comes close on the heels of the STS-122 flight of Atlantis, which landed just nine days ago. That shuttle crew delivered and installed the European Columbus laboratory onto the ISS. Now that the Japanese components are going up, the station is really starting to take on a multinational character. The three-member station crew currently consists of American Peggy Whitson, Russian Yuri Malenchenko, and Frenchman Leo Eyharts - though Eyharts will be replaced with U.S. astronaut Garrett Reisman who is flying up on Endeavour. If all goes as planned and the build-out of the station continues on track, the ISS crew will expand to six members next year.

If you are really a shuttle junkie, check out NASA TV on Monday. Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston will be holding a series of briefings for the media to go over the plan for the mission in detail … and in the afternoon the crew will answer questions at a press conference. Here’s the schedule for all that if you want to check it out.

All times are Eastern …

9 a.m. - STS-123 Program Overview Briefing

10:30 a.m. - STS-123 Mission Overview Briefing

12:30 p.m. - STS-123 Spacewalk Overview Briefing

2 p.m. - STS-123 Crew News Conference

6 p.m. STS-123 Mission Specialist Takao Doi News Conference to Japan

–Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology

Spacewalkers Rex Walheim and Stan Love are back inside after wrapping up the third and final spacewalk of the STS-122 mission. They successfully installed two experiment packages to the exterior of the new Columbus laboratory, and transferred a gyroscope that failed last year from a stowage rack to Atlantis’ cargo bay for return to Earth. Stan Love must be jazzed that he got to do two spacewalks on this mission. He was only scheduled to do the one today, but of course got an extra trip out of the hatch for EVA 1 when Hans Schlegel fell ill.

Astronauts will spend tomorrow and the first part of Sunday outfitting Columbus to get the experiment racks and work stations up and running, and also competing all the supplies and equipment transfers between shuttle and station. Later Sunday, the Atlantis crew will get in the shuttle and close the hatches, preparing to undock from the station early on Monday.

If all goes as planned, they’ll land at the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday at 9:06am.

Also, if you enjoy following shuttle missions you won’t have long to wait for the next one. The shuttle Endeavour is set to roll out to launch pad 39A at KSC on Monday morning, first motion expected just after midnight. The 3.4 mile trip generally takes about 6 - 8 hours. Launch is targeted for March 11.

– Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology

Astronauts are entering the European Columbus laboratory for the first time today, kicking off the start of a new era on the orbiting outpost.

French astronaut Leo Eyharts was the first in, wearing goggles and a surgical mask to protect against “foreign object debris” — things like tiny metal shavings — left over from the manufacturing process. Once the vents and fans are switched on and the air starts “turning over” in the lab, all the particulate matter will get filtered out.

Next up: the astronauts will start outfitting the lab for use…installing racks and hooking up equipment.

Crew members are also doing two sets of media interviews today.

In the first one, NFL player-turned-astronaut Leyland Melvin, who installed Columbus onto the ISS Monday using the station’s robotic arm, commented on the parallels between sports and being part of the Atlantis crew.

“On the grid iron it is all about team work, and in space it is about teamwork. We have people on the ground in Germany, in the the U.S., all over the world helping us get this attached to the International Space Station. So when you think about sports, you think about teams, and sportsmanship, we have all of that here in space.”

Another set of interviews is set for later this afternoon, with Hans Schlegel scheduled to participate. You will recall Schlegel is the German astronaut who had to miss the first spacewalk of the mission, apparently due to motion sickness. I’ll update the blog if he says anything interesting.

-Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology

Things didn’t QUITE go as expected for NASA this weekend 200 miles overhead … though the shuttle Atlantis’ rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station went off without a hitch on Saturday.

About half of all astronauts experience some nausea the first couple of days in orbit, with symptoms usually subsiding in time for everyone to get down to the tasks of the mission. That was apparently not the case with German spacewalker Hans Schlegel. The crew requested two private medical conferences with flight surgeons on Saturday, and at the end of the day fight controllers announced that the first spacewalk of the mission, then scheduled for Sunday, would be postponed to today. They also announced Schlegel would be replaced on that spacewalk by fellow astronaut Stan Love.

Citing medical privacy policy, NASA officially refuses to release any details of Schlegel’s physical condition. Sources tell us, though, that he just had a particularly bad case of motion sickness. NASA TV showed live pictures of him on Sunday helping Love and Rex Walheim prep their spacesuits and tools for the spacewalk, and he looked like he was doing much better. As of now, the plan is for him to resume his duties for the second spacewalk of the mission, scheduled for Wednesday.

On today’s spacewalk, Love and Walheim are installing a grapple fixture to the exterior of the European Columbus Module. Robotic arm operator Leland Melvin will then use the station’s robotic arm to grab Columbus, remove it from Atlantis’ cargo bay, and attach it to the starboard side of the Harmony node.

I never get tired of watching the shuttle’s back flip, or Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver, as it approaches the station from below — and on Saturday Commander Steve Frickdid not disappoint. The purpose of the RPM is to expose the orbiter’s underside to the ISS so that station crew members can take high resolution photos of the tiles that clad the belly — looking for any signs of damage that might have happened during launch. The early read from the shuttle’s Mission Management Team is that those tiles are in great shape — as is the carbon composite material that shields the wing leading edges and nose cap. Engineers are still looking at a ripped thermal blanket on Atlantis’ right OMS pod. This is not a huge deal — no threat to crew safety — but the NASA folks may decide to send an astronaut over to pat it back down and staple it in place during an upcoming spacewalk in order to minimize the heating to that part of the shuttle during the super-hot temperatures of re-entry. Atlantis will next fly the high-profile Hubble Servicing Mission in August, and the less work that has to be spent back in the hanger fixing little things the better.

-Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology