ESA: Five years of ISS crews - Soyuz spacecraft prove reliable shuttle

ESA

Five years of ISS crews - Soyuz spacecraft prove reliable shuttle

Just over five years ago the Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft was launched into orbit. There had been 30 previous launches of the Soyuz-TM spacecraft, all of which went to the Mir Space Station. This flight however was a landmark in spaceflight history as it carried the first Expedition Crew to the International Space Station where it arrived and docked two days later.

On 2 November 2005 it was precisely five years ago that Bill Shephard, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev entered through the hatch between the Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft and the International Space Station establishing a permanently occupied international outpost in space. This marked a new era in human spaceflight, which had officially started with the signing of the ISS Intergovernmental Agreement between the five international partners: USA, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan in January 1998. Of all the astronauts that have been on mission to the station, seven of these have been European, with six of these being ESA staff members: Roberto Vittori, André Kuipers, Pedro Duque, Frank De Winne, Claudie Haigneré and Umberto Guidoni.

The seventh was Philippe Perrin who at the time of the flight was a CNES staff member and later became a member of ESA’s European Astronaut Corps in 2002 before joining Airbus Industries as a test pilot in 2004.