ROUGH CUT - NO REPORTER NARRATION<br/> PLEASE NOTE: THIS EDIT CONTAINS CONVERTED 4:3 MATERIAL<br/> A Russian Soyuz capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Friday (December 23) with a trio of astronauts, bringing the orbital outpost back to full staffing after a failed cargo ship launch in August disrupted flight schedules.<br/> Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA's Don Pettit and the European Space Agency's Andre Kuipers blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday for the space station, a 100 billion US dollars research complex that orbits about 240 miles (386 kilometers) above Earth.<br/> Their two-day trip in the cramped capsule ended at 10:19 a.m. EST (1519 GMT) when the Soyuz slipped into the Earth-facing docking port on the station's Rassvet module.<br/> Kononenko, Pettit and Kuipers join station commander Dan Burbank and two cosmonauts, who have been aboard the orbital outpost since November 16.<br/> The station has been short-staffed for most of the past three months.<br/> Crew flights to the station were delayed while Russian engineers scrambled to find and fix the cause of a Progress cargo ship engine failure on August 24. The engine is virtually identical to one used on the Russian Soyuz capsules that ferry crew.<br/> With the return to a six-member crew, the station can resume full-time science operations, including medical research, physics experiments and astronomical observations. The crew also will begin preparations for the arrival of the first commercial cargo ship.
