CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., April 28 (UPI) -- A two-man caretaker crew arrived Monday at the International Space Station to take over control of the outpost from three men whose homecoming was delayed by the shuttle Columbia accident.
Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and astronaut Ed Lu docked their Soyuz TM spacecraft at the station at 1:56 a.m., after a two-day journey that began with launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Lu, Malenchenko and another cosmonaut were to fly to the station in March aboard the shuttle Atlantis, which would have returned with the current space station crew.
However, NASA grounded its fleet after the Feb. 1 Columbia accident. The cause of the shuttle's destruction as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere is under investigation. The three remaining space shuttles are not expected to return to flight until next year.
NASA is working on several technical and operational changes to improve safety, including extensive photography of the shuttle while it is in orbit to check for damage. Columbia was destroyed because of a breach in its left wing, believed to have been caused by a debris impact at a launch. The breach allowed superheated air to get inside the structure during re-entry and melt it.
Station science officer Don Pettit previewed what might become routine during future shuttle missions to the station, photographing the approaching capsule with a powerful telescopic lens.
Malenchenko and Lu entered the space station, where they were warmly welcomed by Pettit, commander Ken Bowersox and flight engineer Nikolai Budarin.
"We're very happy to have arrived here," Malenchenko said from aboard the station. "We're very happy to see our friends, to see them looking great and healthy."
The new crew will spend a week learning about how to operate the station before Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin board another Soyuz capsule to return to Earth.
The new crew is short one person in an attempt to stretch supplies while the shuttle fleet is grounded.
"This year is going to be a difficult one," Yuri Semenov, head of the Russian aerospace contractor RSC Energia Corp., said in a news conference after the docking.
"The financial support has not been implemented for this year so far," Semenov added. "We have just words of promise and we do hope that these promises will be materialized soon ... We are expecting that our partners are not going to just be observers."
