Alumna to Dock at ISS Today (Live Video!)

For the third time in her life, alumna Cady Coleman '83 is on a shuttle headed for the International Space Station, some 220 miles above earth. The retired Air Force officer is accompanied by two crew mates aboard the Russian Soyuz; together they will join a team of three who have been working on the ISS since October. Live coverage of the docking is scheduled for today at 2:30 pm ET. View it at www.nasa.gov.

NASA says that the journey from the Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where the crew blasted off on Wednesday, to the ISS will last just over 49 hours. Upon landing, the astronauts are scheduled to participate in a traditional greeting ceremony, talk to family and officials on the ground, and then be briefed on station safety procedures.The remainder of Coleman's six-month stay will be consumed with experiments, station maintenance, and research.

In a blog post Wednesday, Coleman wrote:

I’ll keep this short because there are still a few things that I’d like to pack into my last few hours on the planet until next May, not to mention I’m spending as much time as I can with my husband Josh and my sons Josiah and Jamey, before I go. I’m hoping that the photos attached will tell the story of our final few weeks of training before launch.

Who would have thought that it would all happen so fast? This day was always something that would happen sometime in the future… but I find myself in Baikonur, Russia, preparing to launch on a Soyuz for a six-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS), AND I’m turning 50 today. If this is what “Downhill from Here” means – then bring it on!

I thought I knew what getting ready to launch would be like. As a backup for Expedition 24, I watched the prime crew as they completed all the training that precedes a Soyuz launch. I climbed into their spacecraft for a fit check, took all the last classes, got signed off by the medical and training commissions and was pronounced “Certified for Spaceflight”. If my counterpart on the prime crew couldn’t launch for some reason, then I would go in their place.

Now I’m finding that everything feels different when you are really the NEXT crew to launch. I realize that the prime crew always had a look in their eyes – a kind of wonder and anticipation that can’t be felt by the backups. Not many people get to leave our planet in a spacecraft bound for the International Space Station – and Dmitry Kondratev, Paolo Nespoli and I, the crew of Soyuz TMA 20, are launching in less than 24 hours!