NASA said earlier that the shuttle's landing in Florida was postponed from Wednesday to Thursday due to unfavorable weather conditions and concerns over a video taken by a shuttle camera showing an object that appeared to fly the Atlantis craft on Tuesday.
Igor Panarin said both the ISS and Soyuz, carrying the world's first female space tourist, did not foresee difficulties, and that the docking would take place Wednesday at 9:25 a.m. Moscow time [5:25 a.m. GMT].
The Russian rocket carrying space tourist Anousheh Ansari, 40, a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin, NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin to the International Space Station lifted off Monday morning from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.
The Russian-U.S. crew will join German astronaut Thomas Reiter when the spacecraft docks with the ISS in two days, and the new crew will replace Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who have been on the station since April.
The outgoing crew will take the Iranian-American telecommunications businesswoman, who paid $20 million for the tour, back to Earth in late September.
The new crew is scheduled to meet two U.S. shuttles at the ISS, to unload two Russian Progress cargo ships and to perform four spacewalks.
