Space crew lands while replacements wait

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.?? Three astronauts returned safely to Earth from the International Space Station on Friday, while their replacements found out how much longer they'll have to wait before their own space trip.

NASA astronaut Ron Garan and Russian cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev rode a Russian Soyuz spacecraft down to the steppes of Kazakhstan just before 10 a.m. local time (midnight ET), finishing up their five-month space mission.

The only glitch experienced during the descent was a period of spotty air-to-ground communications that built up some suspense about the crew's condition. Communication was eventually established between the crew and an Antonov fixed-winged aircraft circling the landing site.

The returning spacefliers were all smiles as they were carried out of the capsule and given medical checkups. Three other astronauts ? NASA's Mike Fossum, Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and Russia's Sergei Volkov ? stayed behind on the station.

PhotoBlog: Soyuz capsule returns US-Russian crew safely to Earth

During a Thursday farewell ceremony, Fossum told the departing crew he didn't want to see them go. "We like the company. We love the friendship. We've lived together closer than families in many ways. We wish you all the best," said Fossum, who took Borisenko's place as station commander.

Garan, the crew's most avid Twitter user, signed off with what he called his "final tweet from space."

"Thanks for being with me on this amazing journey," he wrote in an update accompanied by a picture of the moon floating above Earth's atmosphere.

The returning crew's replacements ? NASA flight engineer Dan Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin ? were originally scheduled to arrive Sept. 24, but the flight was delayed following an Aug. 24 launch accident involving an unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship bound for the station.

An upper-stage motor failed on the Progress craft's Soyuz rocket, causing it to burn up in the atmosphere and shower debris across part of Siberia. The unmanned version of the Soyuz rocket is virtually identical to the manned version that is used to fly crew to the station on Soyuz rockets. For that reason, U.S. and Russian space officials put the next Soyuz launch on hold until they could determine what caused the failure.

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Last week, investigators said the accident was caused by an engine manufacturing flaw, and the Russians subsequently cleared the Soyuz rocket for flight. Russia plans to launch another unmanned cargo ship on Oct. 30 before putting astronauts on the pad.

On Thursday, NASA said that Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin would launch on Nov. 14 and arrive at the station two days later.

The departure of Borisenko, Samokutyaev and Garan leaves the station's remaining three crew members on their own for an extended two-month period. They will have little time to prepare the new crew to take over the station before heading home themselves around Nov. 22.

If additional problems force an extended postponement of the Nov. 14 Soyuz launch, space officials might have to proceed with plans to leave the $100 billion space station without a crew and operate it for a while by remote control.

With the retirement of the U.S. space shuttles this summer, crews can reach the station only aboard Russian rockets. China, the only other country able to fly people into orbit, is not a partner in the space station.

The current U.S. plan is to pay Russia to fly NASA astronauts, at a cost of more than $50 million per person, until U.S. companies are able to do so.

A space cargo transport built by SpaceX is scheduled to make a test run to the International Space Station sometime in the next few months, and NASA expects crew-capable commercial spaceships to enter service sometime around the middle of the decade.

This report includes information from Reuters, The Associated Press and msnbc.com.

? 2011 msnbc.com

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44543427/ns/technology_and_science-space/

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