Three Touch Down Sunday Morning

The Soyuz TMA-7 capsule carrying astronaut Bill McArthur, cosmonaut Valery Tokalev and Brazilian astronaut Marco Pontes undocked from the International Space Station, and touched down in central Kazakhstan at 7:48 EDT Saturday evening.

As members of the Expedition 12 crew, McArthur and Tokarev spent six months onboard the ISS. Pontes arrived at the station on April 1, along with Expedition 13 crewmembers Pavel Vinogradov and Jeff Williams, for a weeklong visit to the station.

Commander Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Williams are now the sole residents aboard the ISS. They are scheduled for a six-month stay, until October. a third crewmember, European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter, is scheduled to join Expedition 13 no earlier than July aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Once Reiter arrives at the ISS, the station will have a three-man crew for the first time since May 2003. Assuming that regular shuttle flights resume on schedule, construction on the station is also scheduled to resume by the end of the year.

NASA is committed to 15 international partners to finish assembly on the ISS. NASA's current space strategy calls for that mission to be completed by 2010, at which time the shuttle is due for retirement and NASA's focus will shift to unmanned space exploration programs, as well as the manned Crew Exploration Vehicle that is expected to carry astronauts back to the moon by 2018.

Seventeen missions are planned before the shuttle is retired in 2010 -- 16 for assembly of the International Space Station, and one for servicing the Hubble Space Telescope.

FMI: www.nasa.gov