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Soyuz Heads To Space Station With New Crew
An anonymous reader writes: Last night, a Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to deliver three astronauts to the International Space Station. Russia's Sergey Volkov, Denmark's Andreas Mogensen, and Kazakhstan's Aidyn Aimbetov reached orbit without incident, and they'll dock with the ISS in the wee hours of Friday morning. Mogensen and Aimbetov will only stay until 11 September, at which point they and Expedition 44 commander Gennady Padalka will undock and return to Earth. (Here's a neat time-lapse of changing a Soyuz craft's parking space at the ISS.) Padalka was in charge for the current expedition, but he'll be passing command of Expedition 45 to NASA's Scott Kelly. Kelly and Oleg Kornienko will soon reach the halfway point of their one-year mission at the space station. It's worth noting that this was the 500th rocket launch from the Gagarin launchpad at Baikonur.
Does soyuz need 3 crew to dock? If not, what's the point of sending two up for such a short duration. Joy ride?
Seems it would be a better use of spare launch capacity to send provisions lost in the previous cargo outages.
Other than the 500th launch, it's also worth noting that Andreas Mogensen is Denmark's first astronaut in space.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Most shuttle missions were only a couple weeks. You can get a lot done when you're highly trained and your Internet access is limited.
Even if there were no other reasons, it would be a good idea to send the new people up on a short mission. I'm going to guess that people on long missions did short ones before.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?