A Russian Soyuz spacecraft will launch next week with three space travelers — a Russian, a Japanese and a Canadian — who will initiate the first six-person crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

That Soyuz will rise from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in an afternoon liftoff at 4:34 p.m. (6:34 a.m. ET Wednesday, May 27), and head to the $100 billion space station that was built mostly with U.S. funding.

NASA TV will cover the launch live.

Those three space travelers include Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bob Thirsk. They will arrive at the station at 8:36 a.m. ET May 29.

Those three crew members will join space station Commander Gennady Padalka, a Russian cosmonaut, and Flight Engineers Mike Barratt of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The six men will form the Expedition 20 crew, the station’s first six-person crew. This mission also will be the first time crew members are aboard representing all five ISS partner nations.

Although the space station has been under construction for more than a decade, all while it whizzes along at 17,500 miles an hour some 200-plus miles above Earth (almost the distance from Washington to New York), it never has been fully crewed or utilized.

An orbiting laboratory, or set of laboratories, the ISS until now has had to make do with a crew of no more than three (not counting times when seven space shuttle visitors or three Soyuz visitors barge in for a brief two-weeks-or-so visit).

Because so much of the time of just three crew members is consumed with routine operations of the space station, not much has been done in the way of scientific experiments and research.

Further, many laboratories were attached to the space station only in the past three years, hauled to the heavens in the immense, and immensely powerful, space shuttles.

But now, with most of the labs in place and a full six-member crew on board, the station at last will see the kind of work it is capable of producing, including experiments that can be performed only in a near-zero-gravity environment.

As well, the space station only now will begin the sort of operations that will be crucial to long-distance space journeys, such as to Mars.

Astronauts recently installed a system that converts urine and bodily moisture of astronauts into drinking water. While it has been feasible to haul drinking water to orbit to slake the thirst of the ISS crew, it would be out of the question to haul water to a permanent manned encampment on the moon, or to Mars.

Therefore, for missions to far destinations such as the red planet, everything the crew consumes (and excretes) will have to be recycled.

NASA TV will carry the following events (all times Eastern):

Friday, May 15

6 p.m. — Video File of Expedition 20 crew’s traditional breakfast ceremony in Star City, Russia, prior to departure for the Baikonur launch site (replayed at 11 p.m.)

May 26, Tuesday

Noon — Video File of Expedition 20 crew prelaunch activities and training, Soyuz spacecraft rollout and final crew prelaunch news conference in Baikonur

May 27, Wednesday

4:45 a.m. — Video File of Expedition 20 prelaunch activities in Baikonur

5:45 a.m. — Live coverage begins of Expedition 20 launch, scheduled at 6:34 a.m.

Noon — Video File of Expedition 20 launch day activities, launch and post-launch interviews

May 29, Friday

8 a.m. — Live coverage begins of Expedition 20 docking to the space station, scheduled at 8:36 a.m. A post-docking news conference will follow.

9:30 a.m. — Live coverage begins of Soyuz hatch opening, expected at approximately 9:45 a.m., and Expedition 20 welcoming ceremony

1 p.m. — Video File of Soyuz docking to the station, hatch opening and welcoming ceremony