Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore to Begin Training

NASA Astronauts Train for Expedition 40 to the International Space Station

Training will occur in Russia and Baikonur beginning in July 2014

Veteran NASA astronauts, Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore, will begin training this month in Star City, Russia in preparation for their flight to the International Space Station as part of Expedition 40/41. They will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in November 2014 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

During their six-month mission, Williams and Wilmore will serve as flight engineers aboard the orbital laboratory and conduct a variety of experiments in the areas of biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science. They will also perform maintenance and repairs on the station.

Williams, a veteran of two previous spaceflights, will become the second woman to serve as commander of the space station. She is also the first astronaut to have lived on the station twice, logging more than 322 days in space. Wilmore is a rookie astronaut who was selected by NASA in 2000. He has served as a CAPCOM (capsule communicator) in Mission Control for several space shuttle missions and as an aquanaut during two NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) underwater expeditions.

The Expedition 40/41 crew will also include Russian cosmonaut Alexander Samokutyaev. They will join the current Expedition 39 crew, which includes NASA astronaut Steve Swanson, Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano.

The International Space Station is a joint project of five space agencies: NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).