Soyuz prepped for crew ferry flight to space station

Russian ground crews are preparing a Soyuz spacecraft for launch Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to ferry three fresh crew members -- a veteran Russian cosmonaut, an Italian test pilot and an American shuttle veteran -- to the International Space Station.

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Boosting the lab's staff back to six, the Expedition 36/37 crews face a busy stay in space highlighted by a full slate of scientific research, six spacewalks, the arrival of multiple cargo ships carrying critical supplies and, in early November, the Olympic torch, which will herald the 2014 Winter Games at Sochi, Russia, in February.

"I'm very much looking forward to living there," said astronaut Karen Nyberg, who visited the station during a 14-day shuttle flight in 2008. A shuttle mission is "a sprint, you're go, go, go constantly, and you don't have a lot of time to reflect on what you're doing as you're doing it.

"In fact, there's a lot of that mission that I don't really remember," Nyberg said. "I look at pictures and I'm like, 'oh yeah, we did that.' I think with a longer period of time, I'll have time to actually get it ingrained in my brain of where I am and what I'm doing, and I won't need to go back and look at those pictures to remember what it is that I've done."

Married to astronaut Douglas Hurley and mother of a 3-year-old son, Nyberg holds a PhD in mechanical engineering. She said she was eager to participate in station research, but hopes to find a bit of time for her hobbies amid the hectic schedule.

"I don't watch a lot of movies or things like that," she said. "To relax, I like to sew and draw, do things like that. So I've brought a sketch pad and some pencils that I can hopefully do a little bit of sketching. I brought a little bit of fabric and needle and thread. I have no clue yet what I'm going to do with it, but I'll come up with something!"

Asked if she planned to follow in the footsteps of former commander Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut who gained internet fame with his prolific Twitter postings, Nyberg said she was still considering how she might utilize social media.

"I haven't decided yet whether I'll do Twitter," she said. "I've been using Pinterest for a couple of years and absolutely love it because of my other hobbies and have actually started my own personal account, adding some space things. I think it will be kind of neat to add on to that while I'm there if I can. Definitely, we're going to do as much as we can to share what we're doing up there with the rest of the world."

Nyberg, Soyuz TMA-09M commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and European Space Agency flight engineer Luca Parmitano are scheduled to blast off Tuesday at 4:31:24 p.m. EDT (GMT-4; 2:34 a.m. Wednesday local time) from the same pad used by Yuri Gagarin at the dawn of the space age.

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Soyuz prepped for crew ferry flight to space station