Colonel Vittori will spend a short time with the ISS on a visiting crew. Manning the new standing crew will be steeled spacemen - Russia's Sergei Krikalev and John Fillips of the USA. They will relieve Salizhan Sharipov and Leroy Chiao, at the ISS since last October.
Russia's Mikhail Tyurin and America's Daniel Tani, on the standby crew, also have long space records-Tyurin made Mir flights, and Tani Shuttle.
Vittori is finishing flight preparations at the Yuri Gagarin space training center near Moscow.
The Lazio provincial administration is sponsoring his upcoming ISS flight, as it did his first. Based in the province are numerous space-oriented industrial companies.
Colonel Roberto Vittori of the Italian Air Force made his first ISS flight, April 2002, together with Russian spaceman Yuri Gidzenko and Mark Shuttleworth, South African businessman and the world's second space tourist.
Vittori has a flying record of approximately 2,000 hours. He feels at home with many aircraft-the F 104, Tornado GR 1, F 18, AMX, M-2000, 0-222 and P180 among them. The Italian Space Agency and the ESA selected him for space flights, July 1998. A month later, Vittori joined the European astronaut team, which bases at the European Astronaut Centre, Cologne, Germany.
