HOUSTON — NASA astronaut Kevin Ford of Indiana, making final preparations for an October launch to the International Space Station at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, Star City, Russia, will be available for live satellite interviews from 5 to 6 a.m. CDT Friday, Oct. 5.

The interviews will originate from Star City, and will be preceded at 4:30 a.m. by a video b-roll feed of Ford’s mission training and previous spaceflight. To participate in the interviews, reporters should contact Karen Svetaka at 281-483-8684 or 281-433-0830 no later than 2 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4.

Ford, who previously served as pilot aboard space shuttle Discovery on its STS-128 mission to the station in September 2009, will first serve as an Expedition 33 flight engineer through mid-November, and will then transition to commander of Expedition 34 through March, 2013. Ford is scheduled to launch with Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin of the Russian Federal Space Agency at 5:51 a.m. CDT Oct. 23 (4:51 p.m. Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad 31 in Kazakhstan.

A retired U.S. Air Force colonel, Ford is a native of Montpelier, Ind. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Notre Dame, a master’s in international relations from Troy State University, a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida, and a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology. He was selected as an astronaut in 2000. Ford’s biography is available at: http://go.nasa.gov/kevinford

Ford and his colleagues will be aboard the station during an exceptionally busy time that includes cargo operations of two SpaceX Dragon commercial vehicles; four Russian Progress resupply vehicles, and the arrival of “Cygnus,” the first commercial cargo spacecraft from the Orbital Sciences Corp., scheduled for December 2012. November will bring the departure of station crew members Sunita Williams, Yuri Malenchenko and Aki Hoshide, while mid-December will bring Ford and his crewmates three new crew members – NASA’s Tom Marshburn, Canada’s Chris Hadfield and Russia’s Roman Romanenko – rounding out the six-person Expedition 34 crew.

Ford previously spent 14 days in space as pilot aboard the space shuttle Discovery’s STS-128 mission in 2009, which delivered the multi-purpose logistics module “Leonardo” to the station with more than 15,000 pounds of science and storage racks to the orbiting outpost. On that mission, Ford used Discovery’s robotic arm to help conduct a survey of the shuttle’s heat shield; installed and unberthed “Leonardo,” operated the station’s robotic arm in support of two of the mission’s three spacewalks and helped unload critical supplies from Leonardo.

NASA TV’s Media Channel 103 will carry the b-roll and will be used to conduct the interviews. It is an MPEG-4 digital C-band signal, carried by QPSK/DVB-S modulation on satellite AMC-18C, transponder 3C, at 105 degrees west longitude, with a downlink frequency of 3760 MHz, vertical polarization, data rate of 38.80 MHz, symbol rate of 28.0681 Mbps, and 3/4 FEC. A Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) is needed for reception. The Compression Format is MPEG-4, Video PID = 0x1031 hex / 4145 decimal, AC-3 Audio PID = 0x1035 hex /4149 decimal, MPEG I Layer II Audio PID = 0x1034 hex /4148 decimal.

For information about the space station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station