First Crew

THE FIRST CREW

The first crew for the International Space Station has now been delayed once again and is now expected to launch some time January 2000 on a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It will consist of 2 cosmonauts and 1 astonaut. When they get up there the station will have a rather small sizel, just enough to sustain life. After the current plans, the station will only consist of the Service Module, FGB (Zarya) and Node 1 (Unity) with 3 mating adapters when they first arrive. Their mission will be a flight test of the station and they will assist in the assembly of the station. During their stay of 5 months there will be several shuttle flights to the station. The shuttle will dock at the Node each time and the first flight will deliver the U.S. Lab and other shuttle missions will deliver more equipment racks and supplies, communication systems, Remote Manipulating System and Joint airlock. The U.S. Lab will expand the amount of experiments that can be conducted, which before was limited to small research in the Service Module. The Remote Manipulating System (Canadian robotic arm) will make work on the outside of the station posible without human EVA's. Equipment to outfit the U.S. Lab will be added which could not be carryed up with the module because it would make it to heavy. The Joint airlock will give the astronauts and cosmonauts a joint airlock which will make it possible for them both to exit from. The U.S. and Russia has very different standards on the space suits and can normaly not use each other's air locks. Before this air lock is in place they have to use the node section on the service module or Zarya module to exit the station. The spacewalkers would don their spacesuits and gather in the node section. They would then close up the hatches and depressurize the section before they would exit a hatch leading to open space. This used to be done on Mir before they got their Kvant-2 module which has an airlock. It has been done after that to when they had to do internal spacewalks to Spektr to repair the power supply in the collision damaged module.


The U.S. Laboratory	The canadian roboticarm

When the last shuttle during their stay goes down they will go down with it and a new crew which came with that shuttle will replace them. The Soyuz spacecraft that the first crew came up with will stay docked at the station and continue to serve as a rescue vehicle in case something goes wrong.

FIRST CREW

Person	Yuri Pavlovich Gidzenko	Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev	William M. Shepherd
Age	36	39	48
Hometown	Elanets, Russia	Leningrad, Russia	Babylon, New York
Start or carrer	1989	1985	1984
Flight history	Commander of Euromir September 95 to February 96	3 Mir missions, first cosmonaut on the space shuttle, 7 spacewalks and STS-88 to install Node1.	3 shuttle flights
Days in space	180	442	19

Related Info:
NASA | JSC | Shuttle | Shuttle-Mir | Mir

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