A Russian Soyuz spaceship carrying three travelers docked with the International Space Station, meaning that the station crew size for the first time was doubled to six people from the prior limit of three.
It was the United States that financed most of the $100 billion space station and provided the space shuttles that alone possessed the brawn to haul huge station structural components to orbit.
But a Russian component, Zarya, was the first segment of the station to be placed in orbit in a flight by a Russian Proton robotic heavy lifter cargo rocket rising from Kazakhstan. It was the Russian Soyuz that provided U.S. astronauts with access to the station after space shuttle disasters. It is the Soyuz that just carried the first travelers to make up a six-person crew on the station. And it will be the Soyuz that will provide American astronauts with access to the station for half a decade, from 2010 to 2015, during which NASA will lack its own human space flight capability.
In the latest Soyuz flight, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bob Thirsk soared to space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Reaching the station, they joined three crew members already aboard the orbiting laboratory, Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Mike Barratt of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to form the Expedition 20 crew.
It will mark the first time all five partner agencies are represented by astronauts on the station at the same time.