Abstract
After two members of Expedition 19 arrived in Soyuz TMA-14 to join Wakata, Soyuz TMA-15 delivered Expedition 20 to create the first six-person resident crew. It was on the former flight that Charles Simonyi made his second visit to the ISS as a space tourist. He returned to Earth with the retiring crew in Soyuz TMA-13.
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Notes
- 1.
NASA held and internet competition to name Node 3. Options included Earthrise, Legacy, Serenity, and Venture. Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report had encouraged his viewers to vote in a NASA online poll to name the module after himself. Although ‘Colbert’ garnered the most votes, NASA opted for the eighth most popular name, Tranquility. As a consolation, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams appeared on the television show and announced that the new treadmill was to be named after the host. Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT).
- 2.
Thales Alenia Space can rightly claim to have built a significant amount of the International Space Station. As well as Tranquility, it manufactured the Harmony module for NASA, the Columbus module for ESA, the Cupola for ESA, and the Permanent Multi-purpose Module (PMM) Leonardo. It also built the Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules which delivered cargo to the station by carriage in the Shuttle payload bay, the pressurised section of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (five of which automated spacecraft delivered cargo to the station), and the pressurised module of the Cygnus spacecraft (nine of which at the time of writing had delivered cargo to the station, with more planned).
- 3.
Due its shape and multiple window configuration, the Cupola bears a striking resemblance to the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon spacecraft of the movie Star Wars.
- 4.
These are the home towns of Robinson, Behnken and Hire respectively.
- 5.
Serenity was one of the name choices offered by NASA in the internet competition to name Node 3, which would eventually be named Tranquility. Fans of the TV show Firefly mounted a strong campaign but lost out to the fans of The Colbert Report.
- 6.
In the ‘bake-out’ process the contaminated portion of a suit is exposed to sunlight for long enough to vaporise the ammonia crystals. This procedure is common and normally takes 30 minutes.
- 7.
The USOS consists of the non-Russian parts of the station. It includes the European-manufactured American components, the main solar arrays, and the Columbus and Kibō laboratories. The Zarya module forms part of the Russian Orbital Segment but is officially owned by NASA because NASA paid for the ex-Mir module rather than complete the development of the over-budget Lockheed Bus-1 module.
- 8.
At the time of writing, Rassvet was the last Russian segment launched to the ISS. There are reports that the next planned module, the Multi-purpose Laboratory Module (MLM) Nauka will be launched in August 2019 or perhaps in 2020. However, its completion has been significantly delayed because its originally planned launch date was 2007. If launched, it will replace Pirs at Zvezda’s nadir port.
- 9.
Launch on Need (LON) missions were initiated after the 2003 Columbia loss. The plan was that for every mission to the ISS, the crew and Orbiter of the next planned mission could be reassigned to a rescue mission within 40 days in the event of Orbiter in space being unable to return to Earth. This was predicated on the crew using the ISS as a safe haven. Initial missions were titled STS-300, then they were labelled STS-3XX instead of their original STS-1XX moniker. For STS-125, a Hubble Space Telescope maintenance mission without an ISS safe haven, STS-400 was the LON mission. For STS-400, Endeavour was ready to launch only 7 days after Atlantis in order to conduct a Shuttle to Shuttle rescue. For this reason, in September 2008 two Shuttles sat at the twin launch pads of Pad 39 simultaneously.
- 10.
Zhezkazgan in the Karaganda Region is home to the headquarters of the copper conglomerate Kazakhmys. In Soviet times it was the site of the labor camp Kengir, as mentioned in Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago.
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O’Sullivan, J. (2019). Soyuz TMA-17, Expeditions 22 and 23. In: Japanese Missions to the International Space Station. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04534-0_8
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