On Tuesday morning, Expedition 18 members, together with space flight enthusiast Richard Garriott, son of U.S. astronaut Owen Garriott, arrived at the International Space Station at around 4:26 a.m. EDT, aboard the Russian Soyuz TMA-13 module. The spacecraft successfully docked with the ISS to the Earth-facing port of the Zarya module, under the control of Commander Edward Michael Fincke and Flight Engineer Yuri Valentinovich Lonchakov.

The Soyuz spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday, starting a six-month space mission for E18 members, who will replace Commander Sergei Volkov and Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko on the International Space Station. On October 23, the staying on the International Space Station of adventurer Richard Garriott will come to an end, as he will return to Earth together with the two members of E17, aboard the Soyuz TMA-12 capsule.

Expedition 17 members, including astronaut Gregory E. Chamitoff, who arrived at the International Space Station in May this year with the mission Discovery and will serve as a flight engineer for Expedition 18 as well, were part of the welcoming crew for expedition 18 members and Garriott.

NASA announced that astronaut Sandra H Magnus will replace Chamitoff as a flight engineer for E18 upon arrival to the International Space Station on STS-126. Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, who will arrive at the International Space Station on the STS-119 misison, will replace Magnus toward the end of E18.

Richard Garriott is at his first attempt to follow the footsteps of his father, STS-9 astronaut Owen Garriott, into space. Thanks to the Space Adventures, the travel company with the most exciting journeys ever, Garriott arrived at the destination of a lifetime, where he will spend the next days, before landing back on Earth on October 24. Before returning to Earth, Garriott will have completed over 170 orbits of the Earth.

Before embarking on the journey of a lifetime, Garriott wrote to his friends and family: “I feel well prepared for this flight … the last two weeks have been filled with a wonderful combination of final reviews of specific data for our flight, final inspections of the vehicle and rocket, along with plenty of time to rest and reflect about what is about to happen … I will return to our earth in a few weeks, with a vast array of photographs, and a lifetime of new stories.”

Garriott, who completed a cosmonaut-training program at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia, will continue the mission of his father for scientific and environmental purposes. This will include capturing unique images, which by comparison with the ones taken by his father, will help him and The Nature Conservancy establish how the Earth has changed over the past decades.

Furthermore, Garriott will participate in a series of experiments, mostly oriented toward the impact of spaceflight on astronauts: the physical impact, the impact on their immune system, on their sleep/wake patterns and sleep characteristics. He will also contribute to European Space Agency’s study on the early detection of osteoporosis, vestibular adaptation to G-force transitions, and the occurrence of lower back pain, Space Adventures informed.