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In the final minutes before touchdown, the braking parachutes were jettisoned to make way for the billowing ringed parachute that slows the module to around 25 kph (15 mph). Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko has now taken over as commander of the space station and will stay until July together with NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Holland's Andre Kuipers. They will now prepare for the arrival of first commercial cargo shipment to the space station in early May. The Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, launches its Dragon capsule from Cape Canaveral on April 30, and the capsule will take a few days to get to the space station. It will be the first time a private company has launched space station supplies. The space station will then return to its standard six-person crew with the arrival of NASA astronaut Joe Acaba and Russian colleagues Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin, who will blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 17.
[Associated
Press;
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