ISS Expedition 26/27 crewmembers (Cady Coleman, Dmitry Kondratyev, Paolo Nespoli) look out from the windows of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center Tupolev-134 on a holding pattern near the Baikonur airport waiting for the go to commence the final approach on 3 December 2010. Baikonur, Kazakhstan, is the site of the Russian cosmodrome from where most of the Russian rockets are launched into Space. The launch on a Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft is in less than 2 weeks.
Paolo Nespoli, ESA's Italian astronaut, will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) on 15 December for a long-duration mission called MagISStra and serve as flight engineer for Expeditions 26 and 27. This will be the third six-month mission by a European astronaut on the Station.