New crew, U.S. tourist dock with space station

A Russian Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft with U.S. space tourist Richard Garriott, U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov blasts off from a launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome October 12, 2008.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying U.S. video game developer Richard Garriott docked with the International Space Station Tuesday.

When the hatches are opened, Garriott, the son of U.S. astronaut Owen Garriott, will be welcomed onto the station by Sergei Volkov, whose father Alexander was orbiting the earth when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

"Everything went well, everything went according to plan," said a spokesman for Moscow mission control.

Space tourist Garriott, U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe Sunday.

Volkov and Garriott will become the first children of previous space adventurers to meet in orbit, according to U.S. space agency NASA. Their fathers met at mission control near Moscow and congratulated the crew on the successful docking.

"Perhaps we are not old enough yet to return to space," Owen Garriott joked with Alexander Volkov at a news conference broadcast from mission control by NASA television.

Fincke will serve as commander of the six-month Expedition 18 mission which will focus on preparing the station to house six crew members on longer-duration missions.

Russian space officials said problems with a toilet aboard the station had been resolved.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Tatiana Ustinova, editing by Ralph Boulton)