A Soyuz spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) carrying three new space travelers set to explore the life aboard the orbiting outpost. The international team consists of an American, a Russian and an astronaut from Japan.
The Expedition 44 crew reached full size when the trio of space travelers reached the space station on July 23, six hours after they left the Earth.
Kjell Lindgren, a NASA astronaut, became the 217th person to visit the space station when the hatches between the Soyuz and the ISS opened at 12:56 a.m. EDT on the day of the docking.
"Now THAT was awesome. Thank you to everyone who made this dream come true!" Lindgren tweeted after his dramatic nighttime launch.
Lindgren describes himself as a "space nerd in paradise," telling his nearly 22,000 Twitter followers that he is learning to fly as he orbits the Earth aboard the space station. Born in Taiwan, Lindgren was selected by NASA as an astronaut in June 2009. The 42-year-old spent most of his childhood in England, and while in the Air Force Academy, he was an instructor and jumpmaster in the Wings of Blue parachute team.
Oleg Kononenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) is the only space veteran among the trio who rode onboard Soyuz. This is his third flight into space, following missions as a flight engineer on Expedition 17. The 51-year-old space traveler is a native of Turkmenistan, where he grew up dreaming of flying into space.
"After I graduated from high school I made a conscious decision to go to the aviation institute and I wanted to become a cosmonaut. Maybe for a human it's not so very good to have just one goal in life, but so it is with me," Kononenko said.
Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) became the 218th person to step foot inside the ISS as he took part in his maiden flight into orbit. Born in Kawakami, Nagano, in Japan, he served the Japanese government as an aquanaut in the Aquarius underwater laboratory in June 2012.
Expedition 44, now at its full complement of six members, will carry out hundreds of experiments in biology, physics, geology and other fields of research.
The flight to ferry the space travelers to the ISS was delayed for two months following the loss of an automated cargo craft that spun out of control in April 2015.
The trio of astronauts will stay onboard the space station until December 2015, when the space travelers will return to Earth.
