André Kuipers shortly after leaving the Cosmonaut Hotel

ESA astronaut André Kuipers shortly after leaving the Cosmonaut Hotel at Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on the morning of 21 December 2011.

He is scheduled to be launched later today in the a Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft as a flight engineer for Expeditions 30 and 31. Travelling together with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and NASA astronaut Don Pettit, they will remain in space for nearly five months as part of the international crew of six on the ISS.