Space station trip will push the envelope

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

Flight records in the risky world of aerospace are often achieved by "pushing the envelope," poking beyond the "red lines" and charting new operational regimes. And that’s just what astronauts on the international space station will do when they head home in mid-April.

With the space station set to receive a new crew, the current team keeps setting new records to delight statisticians: Station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria has attained top status in the U.S. record book for spacewalking, and his American colleague Sunita Williams (who will remain aboard across the handover) now holds the women's spacewalking record. Their Russian crewmate Mikhail Tyurin has done some of his own record-grabbing, including his famous "space golf" shot.

The crew due to fly up to the station in a Russian Soyuz capsule — incoming Russian expedition commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, his flight engineer (and Soyuz vehicle commander) Oleg Kotov and billionaire space passenger Charles Simonyi — are also in line to make history when they lift off April 7.

It will be the first time in the space station's history that a three-person Soyuz crew has been commanded by a space rookie. And because of a scheduling modification, the visiting crew will be aboard the station for two extra days — making this the longest "short-term" visit to the space station.

But the most significant "longest ever" record is more than merely a bigger number for a record book. It’s a question of current crew safety, as well as potential improvements in space transportation as the station evolves into a permanent six-person crew.

The crew coming back to Earth — Lopez-Alegria, Tyurin and Simonyi — will be landing in a spacecraft with an "expired warranty." Their Soyuz TMA-9 capsule will be the oldest-ever Soyuz to bring crewmen back to Earth.

The official on-orbit lifetime of the Soyuz TMA spacecraft — an upgraded version of the same basic design that first carried a cosmonaut into orbit on April 23, 1967 — is 210 days. If current schedules hold, the crew will be landing 214 days after launch.

Since it was introduced in 2001, the Soyuz TMA model has averaged about 188 days per flight, with none lasting more than 195 days. An earlier model, supporting visits to the Mir space station, flew as long as 198 days in the late 1990s.

The 210-day lifetime is not a hard-and-fast "drop dead" boundary, so operators at Moscow’s mission control center do not expect any problems. It is unclear how much NASA officials have been told about any extra Russian attention to the possible effects of the longest-ever mission duration.

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