As the launch of the Soyuz TMA-19 lit up the pre-dawn skies around the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, NASA astronauts Doug Wheelock and Shannon Walker and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin began the two-day journey to catch up with the space station currently orbiting 220 statute miles above the Earth.
In September Wheelock, Walker and Yurchikhin will become the Expedition 25 crew when Skvortsov, Kornienko and Caldwell Dyson return home in the Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft that brought them to the station April 4.
U.S. Army Col. Wheelock, 50, is making his second trip into space. As an STS-120 mission specialist aboard space shuttle Discovery in 2007, he traveled to the station and conducted three spacewalks.
Walker, 45, is a graduate of Rice University and the first native Houstonian to be named an astronaut. This is her first spaceflight.
Yurchikhin, 51, is making his third trip into space and his second long-duration stay aboard the station. He flew aboard space shuttle Atlantis on the STS-112 mission to the station in October 2002. He also spent six months aboard the station in 2007 as commander of Expedition 15.
Wheelock, Walker and Soyuz commander Yurchikhin are scheduled to dock with their new home at 5:25 p.m. Thursday, June 17. They will join Expedition 24 crewmates Tracy Caldwell Dyson, a NASA astronaut, and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov, the station commander, and Mikhail Kornienko aboard the orbiting laboratory.
On Thursday, coverage of the Soyuz docking will begin on NASA Television at 5 p.m. NASA TV will return at 9 p.m. for coverage of the hatches opening and the welcoming ceremony aboard the station.