In 2009, Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne broke that cycle to become the first European Space Agency commander. Japan's Koichi Wakata is training to lead the Expedition 39 crew in March 2014.
All three of the station's new residents have made previous spaceflights. Hadfield, 53, is a veteran of two space shuttle missions. Marshburn, 52, has one previous shuttle mission and Roman Romanenko, 41, a second-generation cosmonaut, served as a flight engineer aboard the space station in 2009.
The station crew will have some time off to celebrate several winter holidays in orbit - Christmas, the New Year and then Orthodox Christmas - before tackling a list of about 150 science experiments and station maintenance, including two spacewalks.
Among the studies will be medical research into how the human cardiovascular system changes in microgravity.
"When you live in an environment like that, the heart actually shrinks. Your blood vessel response changes. It actually sets us up to cardiovascular problems," Hadfield said. "We have a sequence of experiments that's taking blood samples and monitoring our body while we're exercising and doing different things to try and understand what's going on with our cardiovascular system," he said.
The research is expected to help doctors unravel the aging process on Earth, which is similar in many respects to what happens to the human body in weightlessness.
In addition to medical research, the space station serves as a laboratory for fluid physics and other microgravity sciences, a platform for several astronomical observatories and a testbed for robotics and other technologies.
(Edited by David Adams and Leslie Gevirtz)
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