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At the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, Expedition 44/45 backup Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) signs in for the first of two days of qualification exams May 6 as his crewmates, Timothy Peake of the European Space Agency (left) and Timothy Kopra of NASA (right) look on. They are the backups to the prime crew --- Kjell Lindgren of NASA, Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos and Kimya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency --- who are in the final stages of training for launch May 27, Kazakh time, in the Soyuz TMA-17M spacecraft to begin a five and a half month mission to the International Space Station.