International space station gets new crew

MOSCOW, April 11 (UPI) -- Another American space tourist is in orbit, but he had to fly on a Russian spacecraft.

Charles Simonyi is a Hungarian-born U.S. citizen and software engineer. He flew Monday to the International Space Station with the 15th crew of the ISS on a Russian Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft that was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Saturday, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

The official crewmembers operating the station were cosmonauts Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Oleg Kotov.

Simonyi is scheduled to remain on the ISS for 13 days, and he hopes to carry out biomedical experiments with worms to see if they regenerate in different ways under conditions of zero gravity, the Russian news agency said. Simonyi is scheduled to return to Earth with the 14th ISS crew, who the new team of cosmonauts is relieving.

Simonyi's visit is of significance in highlighting the continued poor operating schedule of the three remaining U.S. space shuttles since the Columbia was lost on re-entry in 2003. Russia's less ambitious, more old-tech booster rockets and space capsules remain a far more reliable form of transport between the ISS and Earth with U.S. space shuttle flights operating on a far more limited and occasional schedule than Russian Federal Space Agency, or Roskosmos, operations.

The new ISS crew is scheduled to spend 189 days at the station. The longevity of their flight reflects the far more extensive experience the Russian space program has had in keeping its crews operational in space for long periods of time compared with U.S. astronauts.