New Station Crew Launches From Baikonur 03.29.06 Commander Pavel Vinogradov and NASA Science Officer Jeffrey Williams, the 13th International Space Station crew, launched aboard their Soyuz TMA spacecraft at 9:30 p.m. EST Wednesday to begin a six-month stay in space.
Their Soyuz capsule reached orbit a little less than nine minutes after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Russian flight controllers reported the spacecraft’s solar arrays had deployed as scheduled, and that all appeared normal.
The Soyuz is scheduled to dock with the station at 11:19 p.m. March 31.
With the Expedition 13 crew is Marcos Pontes, the first Brazilian astronaut to go into space. He is flying under a contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos).
He will spend about eight days on the station. Pontes will return to Earth with Expedition 12.
They are scheduled to undock at 4:28 p.m. EDT April 8 in the Soyuz that brought them to the station. Landing is scheduled for 7:46 p.m. in the steppes of Kazakhstan. (www.nasa.gov)

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