NASA names new space station crew

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) -- An American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut who performed a spacewalk together three years ago will make a return trip to the international space station later this month and replace its current crew, NASA said Tuesday.

Edward Lu, a physicist, and Yuri Malenchenko, a pilot and engineer, should have flown to the space station last month, aboard the shuttle Atlantis. But the Columbia catastrophe forced an indefinite grounding of NASA's three remaining shuttles.

So Lu and Malenchenko will travel aboard the Russian Space Agency's Soyuz capsule for a space station stay of about six months. The Soyuz is scheduled to lift off from Kazakhstan around April 26.

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