Shuttle Endeavour, which had been docked with the Mir space station, unhooked on Thursday, about a half hour after the Russian space agency launched a Soyuz rocket with three new crew members for the space station.

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Our second goal is to develop and test a new space craft, the crew exploration vehicle, by 2008, and to conduct the first manned mission no later than 2014.

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On board were three new crew members for the International Space Station.

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After unloading the Dragon, the crew of the Space Station will reload it with new cargo for departure to Earth on October 28.

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Space shuttle Discovery docked with the orbiting outpost Sunday afternoon, bringing up the new crew: U.S. commander Frank Culbertson and Russian flight engineers Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin.

CNN: newcrew

They will be joined at the end of the month by three new crew members: NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, Russian cosmonaut Fiyodor Yurchikhin and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, who are due to launch aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on May 28.

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The US space agency is due to retire its shuttles next year and is working on a new crew transportation system, to be introduced in about 2014-15.

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While NASA works with U.S. industry partners to develop these capabilities, the agency also is developing the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS), a crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket to provide an entirely new capability for human exploration.

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