Early on Saturday, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka and American astronaut Scott Kelly will be fully prepared to launch boarding a Soyuz space capsule towards the International Space Station. Kornienko and Kelly are scheduled to be stationed there till March 2016, whereas Padalka has been set out for a six-month mission.
Kornienko has stated at a press release on Thursday that took place at the Russian space facility located in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, that “We will be missing nature; we will be missing landscapes, woods.” He confessed so on his previous trip into space in 2010 “I even asked our psychological support folks to send me a calendar with photographs of nature, of rivers, of woods, of lakes.”
Kelly has been asked if he will be missing his twin brother Mark, who is also an astronaut by profession. On that he remarked, “We’re used to this kind of thing,” he said. “I’ve gone longer without seeing him and it was great.”
There have been missions much longer than this in space, one in particular where 4 Russians were on space for more than a year on board of the Soviet-built Mir Space Station back in the 1990s.
Kornienko said that, “The last time we had such a long duration flight was almost 20 years and of course all … scientific techniques are more advanced than 20 years ago and right now we need to test the capability of a human being to perform such long-duration flights. So this is the main objective of our flight, to test ourselves.”
Kelly on the other hand said, “One of the differences here is that we’re doing it as an international partnership, and if we’re going to go beyond low-Earth orbit again, perhaps to Mars, because of the cost and the complexity it will most likely be an international mission so we see this as a stepping stone to that.”
Regarding the settings of Baikonur, which lies in the immense and desolate prairies of Central Asia, Kelly said “If you’re ever going to go to Mars, going from a place like this would be, you know, a step in the right direction,”
