Mission commander Pavel Vinogradov floats in front of a hatch on the space station.

STARDATE: What will you have to do to get ready for the shuttle to arrive in two months?

JEFF WILLIAMS: There’s a lot of work to do. We have two Progress capsules on board, and we’re loading one up with trash so that it can undock before that time -- actually, before a third Progress docks. So that’s a choreography of moving equipment and cargo well before the shuttle comes.

We also expect to be doing a spacewalk in June, so we’ve got some preparation to do for that. So after all that happens, then the shuttle comes. So we’re choreographing the moving of equipment and supplies and making the room that we need for each event as we go. When the shuttle comes, obviously, we’ll have to be getting ready for the cargo that will be loaded on the shuttle, preparations for the cargo that’s coming off the shuttle during the docked time, as well as getting the airlock ready for the EVAs, for the spacewalks that we’ll be conducting during the shuttle’s docked time.

So everything is choreographed. We have a great team of folks on the ground that do most of that planning and just give us the guidance and the direction and the procedures tools to do our day-to-day business to make all of that happen.