Three new 'nauts head off to ISS
Expedition 25 mating expected Saturday night
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Russian cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexander Kaleri, along with NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, blasted off last night from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome ahead of a five-month stay aboard the International Space Station.
Their Soyuz TMA-01M spacecraft lifted off at 23:10 GMT, and is expected to dock with the orbiting outpost on Saturday night.
The trio will be greeted by fellow Expedition 25 members commander Doug Wheelock and flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Shannon Walker, who've been aboard the ISS since 17 June.
Flight engineer Skripochka is a space rookie. Fellow engineer Kaleri is a four-flight vet who previously visited the ISS as an Expedition 8 crew member from October 2003 to April 2004.
Scott J Kelly commanded space shuttle Endeavour's STS-118 mission to the station in August 2007, having previously piloted the 1999 STS-103 mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA has more on the Expedition 25 'nauts here.
Back on Earth, meanwhile, space shuttle Discovery is being prepped for its slated 1 November launch on STS-133 to the ISS.
The spacecraft is sitting on Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A, where teams are poised to load its Permanent Multipurpose Module payload.
NASA explains: "The module, which will remain attached to the station after Discovery leaves, is loaded with spare equipment, experiments, supplies and Robonaut 2, the first humanoid robot to go into space." ®
COMMENTS
Didn't make the grade?
What happened to poor Robonaut 1? Did he fail the training? Screw the pooch? One too many low-passes over the admirals daughter? Run out of chewing gum?
I think we should be told. Get off your yellow journalistic butts and find out!
Indeed Sarah
Yes, men can indeed have sex with men. However, to really check to see if procreation is possible in weightlessness it really would be necessary for the sperm to be placed in a non-hostile environment. There it can be seen if they (sperms) perform, deform or otherwise get buggered up (oops) by the weightless environment. So, the requirement is to have male to female sex in this environment and after some time to extract some sperm and test it/look at it.
I'm sure that scientists have seen many samples of sperm produced in a weightless environment, it is pretty easy to produce of course, but does it still work properly when placed in a female, that's the research.
Re: bexley
"1) do the americans have to learn russian or do the russians have to learn english?"
In answer, a question: If a person who knows two languages is bi-lingual, and a person who knows three languages is tri-lingual, what do you call a person who only knows one language? Answer below ... [1]
"Weather or not men are able to have sex"
Speaking as one of said troglodytes, men are nearly always able to have sex (barring medical/physical issues). Funny thing is, so are women. Maybe we evolved together, and aren't as dissimilar as society would have the masses believe?
As a side-note, that's an appalling spell of wether[2] ...
[1] Answer: an American. Note CAPS.
[2] Yes, I know, it's "whether" ... I have around 1700 head of sheep and several dozen goats, and thought it funny in this context. So shoot me ;-)
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