International crew takes short cut to space station

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A Russian spaceship took a shortcut to the International Space Station on Tuesday, delivering a veteran cosmonaut, a rookie Italian astronaut and an American mother on her second flight to the outpost in less than six hours.

The capsule slipped into its berthing port at 10:10 p.m. EDT about 250 miles above the south Pacific Ocean.

"Everything went very well," NASA mission commentator Kelly Humphries said during a televised broadcast of the docking.

Typically, the journey takes two days, but Russian engineers have developed new flight procedures that tweak the steering maneuvers and expedite the trip.

One other crew capsule and several cargo ships previously have taken the fast route to the station.

The express ride to the station began at 4:31 p.m. EDT when a Russian Soyuz rocket soared off its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and deposited the crew's capsule into orbit. The spaceship circled around the planet less than four times before catching up to the station, a $100 billion project of 15 nations.

Overseeing operations from aboard the capsule was veteran cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, 54, who will be living aboard the station for the third time. The former commander also flew on NASA's now-retired space shuttle.

He was joined on the Soyuz by first-time astronaut Luca Parmitano, 36, a major in the Italian Air Force. Parmitano, who initially studied political science and international law at the University of Naples, is the first Italian to be assigned to a long-duration mission aboard the station, which is a laboratory for biomedical, materials science and other research.

"This is very momentous," Parmitano said in a preflight NASA interview.

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International crew takes short cut to space station