NASA Announces New
International Space Station Crew
(18 October 2006) NASA and the Russian
Federal Space Agency have named two astronauts and two cosmonauts to the next
International Space Station crew, known as Expedition
15.
Astronauts Clayton C. Anderson and Daniel M. Tani will
travel to the station next year and work as flight engineers. Cosmonauts Fyodor
N. Yurchikhin and Dr. Oleg V. Kotov will spend six months aboard the orbiting
laboratory.
Anderson will get a ride to the station aboard Space Shuttle
Endeavour's STS-118 mission, targeted for launch in June 2007. He will return
to Earth on shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-120. That flight will carry his
replacement, Tani, to the station. Tani will return on shuttle mission STS-122,
targeted for October 2007.
Yurchikhin will command Expedition 15, and
Kotov will serve as station flight engineer and Soyuz commander. Yurchikhin and
Kotov will fly to the complex aboard a Soyuz spacecraft scheduled to launch in
March 2007. Until Anderson arrives, astronaut Sunita L. Williams will serve as
Expedition 15's third crew member and flight engineer. She will fly to the
station on STS-116 in December.
A native of Nebraska, Anderson was
selected as an astronaut in 1998 following a technical career in mission
operations at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston. He managed the Emergency
Operations Center at Johnson for several years before becoming an astronaut. He
has a bachelor's degree from Hastings College in Hastings, Neb., and a master's
from Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.
A native of Illinois, Tani has a
bachelor's and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. He was selected as an
astronaut in 1996. Tani's first spaceflight was aboard Endeavour in December
2001 on the STS-108 mission. During that flight, he performed a four-hour
spacewalk.
Yurchikhin previously visited the space station aboard
Atlantis on STS-112 in 2002. He is qualified as a mechanical engineer and has a
doctorate in economics. Before he was selected as a cosmonaut, Yurchikhin
served as a Russian flight controller and lead engineer for several
missions.
Kotov was selected as a cosmonaut in 1996 and has trained for
Soyuz, Mir and space station missions. He is a graduate of the Kirov Medical
Academy in Russia.
The Expedition 15 backup crew is astronaut Gregory E.
Chamitoff for Anderson; Sandra H. Magnus for Tani; Russian cosmonauts Roman Y.
Romanenko and Mikhail B. Kornienko for Yurchikhin and Kotov.
(source:
NASA)