Meet Soyuz, the spacecraft.

 Meet Soyuz, the updated TMA version that will carry Expedition 29 Commander Dan Burbank, and Cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin into orbit and on a two day rendezvous chase of the International Space Station. The spacecraft is inside the payload shroud on top of the upper stage of the Ol' number 7 booster, what Semyorka roughly translates to from Russian.

  Soyuz first flew atop a Semyorka in 1967, the spacecraft has been redesigned and updated several times since then, and has performed excellently for many years. The current version, optomized for taller people than previous spacecraft could carry, debuted in 2002. The modern version has flat panel displays, modern modularized lightweight avionics, a lighter weight structure, and the typical cozy Descent module pressure vessel layout.  Soyuz is 22.9  feet long, 7.20 feet across the body of the service module, and 35.1 feet across the deployed solar arrays. It weighs 15,900 pounds. It can carry three people on a typical two day rendezvous chase of the International Space Station, followed by proximity formation flying, then closing in for a docking.

 Soyuz TMA normally takes two days to make an automated rendezvous chase, making engine burns to increase its speed and close the gap of severalthousand miles from the International Space Station  to yards, then dock. Chasing the station around the world in thirty two or more orbis  and climbing  from an initial lower orbit to the space station's orbital altitude of 235 statute miles is basically a road to orbit much travelled by the redoubtable Soyuz TMA.

 Soyuz TMA has proven it can do the job of flying into and back from space, and the American and other nations professional and tourist astronauts report the ride is dynamic, being pushed back into your seat liner in the descent module during the powered flight to orbit, the enrapturing experience of microgravity while in orbit, and the incomporable views of Earth that change by the minute, and never gets boring to look at.

 Get used to Soyuz TMA America. It will be how our Astronauts will be flying into and back from space for the next several years, till an alternative crewed spacecraft made in the USA begins to launch into orbit and fly in space.

Soyuz TMA-22 moved to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Expedition 28s crew launch on Sunday.

 The SP Korolev RSC Energia corporation has moved the Semyorka rocket with the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft atop it, to the launch pad at Baikonur in Kazakhstan, in preparation for the next crew launch to the International Space Station. This launch will be the first one with a crew atop the same kind of upper stage that failed to put a Progress resupply spacecraft into orbit in August. Two months of intensive tests and investigation into the causes of the launch failure in August found the cause: a clogged fuel line that kept the upper stage from firing for the proper length of time to put the Progress spacecraft into obit. This problem has been corrected and the Semyorka rocket that will send the 3 man crew of Expedition 28s to the International Space Station on this coming Sunday was railed to the launch pad this morning, before dawn.

 By the light of a just after Full Moon, the Semyorka was pulled out if it’s assembly building, and backed down a rail spur by a locomotive. The rocket with spacecraft inside the payload shroud reached the pad without incident, and was erected from horizontal to vertical in a move done more than 1,800 times since mid 1957.

Expedition 28s, with Commander Dan Burbank , Flight Engineer Anton Shkaplerov, and Anatoly Inavishin, will launch at 8:14 PM Mountain Standard time Sunday night, which of course will be early Monday morning UT and in Kazakhstan. Early start for a workweek for Dan, Anton and Anatoly.

 Much more than a new crew for the International Space Station is at stake. IF this launch to the ISS fails for any reason, and I say IF, it is likely the crew aboard the station will place the station in a mode where it can be controlled from the ground, but little or no science will be done, and the station basically mothballed and on automatic pilot as it were, with no one aboard for who knows how long. So the success of ths flight to the International Space Station is critical to our presence in space, and if it fails, what it will say about our fragile daisy chain of access to our own space station, and those who got us into this precarious position will be obvious.

 I have included two views of the rollout to the pad of Soyuz TMA-22/Expedition 28’s Semyorka so everyone who reads this blog will get a sense of what’s at stake with this launch, as well as the time proven Russian Semyorka/Soyuz combination that has worked very well over many decades to sent people into space.