WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

At the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, Expedition 54-55 backup crewmembers Jeanette Epps of NASA (left), Sergey Prokopyev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos, center) and Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency (right) answer reporters’ questions Nov. 28 as part of their final qualification exam activities. They are serving as backups to the prime crew, Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos, Scott Tingle of NASA and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), who will launch Dec. 17 on their Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft for a five-month mission on the International Space Station