Later in the year, the first resident ISS crew, comprising two Russians and an American, arrived in a Soyuz TM.
The flight was carrying a total number of 239 passengers and crew – comprising 227 passengers (including 2 infants) and 12 crew members.
Only an eight-man crew -- comprising four Venezuelan and four Korean nationals -- was on board at the time it was seized.
The crew comprised commander Rick Husband; pilot William McCool; mission specialists Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel Clark; and payload specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut.
But this is a slow, discursive novel of character as the motivations of the diverse and likable crew, comprising humans and aliens, are laid bare for the reader's delight.
They employed a crew comprised almost entirely of locals, shot on location and filled the soundtrack exclusively with music by Chicago artists like Chance the Rapper and Kanye West.
In mid-2000 the Russian-built module Zvezda, a habitat and control centre, was added, and on November 2 of that year the ISS received its first resident crew, comprising two Russians and an American, who flew up in a Soyuz spacecraft.
David Grann recalled how he put his fledgling New Yorker career in the hands of a half-deaf, color-blind marine biologist who proposed to go out in a sixteen-foot skiff during a cyclone to catch a giant squid with a crew comprised of a seasick graduate student and Grann himself.
Cammas is intent on finishing what he starts this time, but he is also intent on using this debut race to probe the strengths and weaknesses of his Volvo 70 and his cosmopolitan crew, comprising French, Australians, New Zealanders and Swedes.
