New Crew, New Plans for the International Space Station

A quick look at the immediate plans for the mission on the International Space Station, starting with the arrival of the new crew members: NASA astronaut Terry Virts, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov. The flight plan, designed to learn how to help people safely live and work in space, supports the effort to send astronauts to an asteroid and to Mars in the coming years. It includes the early steps of reconfiguring station modules to accommodate future commercial crew vehicles, doing experiments that provide benefits to people on Earth today, including research into 3-D printing, fire suppression, and protecting astronauts’ visual acuity, and the beginning of the first yearlong mission in this station’s history.