It's About To Get Crowded Up There...

Hugs and cheers all around this morning aboard the International Space Station... as the crew of the shuttle Atlantis bade their compatriots farewell, shortly before the orbiter undocked from the station.

Following a much-deserved crew "rest day" Saturday, Atlantis undocked from the International Space Station at 8:50 am EDT Sunday morning, ending STS-115's successful mission to resume construction of the orbiting station, and setting the stage for future assembly missions.

Atlantis delivered the P3/P4 integrated truss to the station. The STS-115 and Expedition 13 crews used the shuttle and station robotic arms to attach the truss to the orbital outpost. Then, STS-115 astronauts conducted three spacewalks in four days to prepare the truss and its solar arrays for operation.

The hatches between the station and Space Shuttle Atlantis closed at 6:27 am EDT.

After Atlantis undocked, Pilot Chris Ferguson performed a 360-degree fly-around of the station -- to allow his crewmates to collect imagery of the newly-expanded station.

Atlantis is scheduled to touch down at 5:57 am EDT Wednesday at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, FL. As for the Expedition 13 crew, they won't be lonely for long.

As Aero-News reported, a Soyuz TMA is scheduled to liftoff early Monday morning, on a mission to rendezvous with the station. Onboard will be Expedition 14 crewmembers Mikhail Tyurin and astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria... as well as "space tourist" Anousheh Ansari. The three are scheduled to dock at the ISS at 1:24 am EDT Wednesday morning.

Most People Ever In Orbit?

An ANN reader sent in a rather intriguing question Saturday evening (always a great time to ask ANN staffers tough questions -- grin): come Monday, with Discovery in orbit... Expedition 14 on its way to the ISS... and the crew presently aboard the station... will that mark the most humans (12) to ever be in space at one time?

Alas, the answer is no... but the record won't be missed by much. According to Wikipedia -- and verified by NASA and the Russian Space Agency -- STS-82 (Discovery) blasted off February 11, 1997 with a crew of seven onboard, for a service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. At the same time, a total of four Russian cosmonauts, one French astronaut and one German astronaut were either onboard the Mir station, or en route to it.

Discovery blasted off one day after TMA-25 was sent into orbit, with three onboard, to rendezvous with Mir; the three persons comprising the TMA-24 crew had been onboard the station since August 1996.

Hence, for 10 days -- from February 11 thru February 21, when Discovery landed -- there were 13 humans in orbit. That's a heady achievement, to be sure... but what excites the staff of ANN the most, is that with the 2010 completion of the ISS, the planned missions of NASA's next-generation Orion space vehicle, and lest we forget, private spaceflight on the horizon... is the strong possibility the present record won't stand for very much longer.

In fact, it looks like it's about to get a LOT more crowded up there.

FMI: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html