The state commission on Sunday will make a final decision at Baikonur on the composition of the crew the jubilee expedition that on April 5 will be launched on the Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS).
"Unless nothing extraordinary happens, the Soyuz TMA-21 spaceship (Gagarin) on Tuesday will be launched to the International Space Station with Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyayev, Andrei Borisenko and NASA astronaut Ronald Garan," a member of the commission told Itar-Tass.
The orbital mission of the ISS Expedition 27/28 crew will last five months.
In early March, the interdepartmental commission assessed the results of the qualifying examination of the main crew as "excellent." The backup crew - Anton Shkaplerov, Anatoly Ivanishin, Daniel Burbank - also demonstrated excellent skills in Russian ISS segments and Soyuz spacecraft mock-ups.
After the termination of US space shuttle flights this year, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft will be the only means of delivering crews to the ISS, the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) said.