WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

At the Cosmonaut Hotel crew quarters in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, the Expedition 54-55 backup crewmembers take a stroll down the Walk of Cosmonauts Dec. 6 to lay flowers in traditional pre-launch ceremonies. From left to right are Jeanette Epps of NASA, Sergey Prokopyev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency. They are serving as backups to Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos, Scott Tingle of NASA and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), who will launch Dec. 17 on the Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft for a five-month mission on the International Space Station