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A Russian Soyuz capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Friday (December 23) with a trio of astronauts, bringing the orbital outpost back to full staffing after a failed cargo ship launch in August disrupted flight schedules.
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA's Don Pettit and the European Space Agency's Andre Kuipers blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday for the space station, a 100 billion US dollars research complex that orbits about 240 miles (386 kilometers) above Earth.
Their two-day trip in the cramped capsule ended at 10:19 a.m. EST (1519 GMT) when the Soyuz slipped into the Earth-facing docking port on the station's Rassvet module.
Kononenko, Pettit and Kuipers join station commander Dan Burbank and two cosmonauts, who have been aboard the orbital outpost since November 16.
The station has been short-staffed for most of the past three months.
Crew flights to the station were delayed while Russian engineers scrambled to find and fix the cause of a Progress cargo ship engine failure on August 24. The engine is virtually identical to one used on the Russian Soyuz capsules that ferry crew.
With the return to a six-member crew, the station can resume full-time science operations, including medical research, physics experiments and astronomical observations. The crew also will begin preparations for the arrival of the first commercial cargo ship.
