He has logged 1500 flight hours in six types of aircraft as a First Class Pilot in the Russian Air Force.

From June 1999 to July 2000, Padalka trained for a space flight on a Soyuz-TM transport vehicle as an ISS contingency crew commander.

Expedition 9 was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz TMA-4 spacecraft, and docked with the ISS on 21 April 2004.

Following a week of joint operations and handover briefings, they replaced the Expedition 8 crew who returned to Earth.

Padalka also commanded the first six-person space station crew (Expedition 20), returning to Earth on 11 October 2009.

[17] He launched to the ISS aboard Soyuz TMA-04M on 15 May 2012, along with fellow crew members Sergei Revin and Joseph Acaba[18] and arrived at the space station on 17 May at 4:36 UTC.

Padalka himself explained his decision by the fact that he has only a small chance to join any space mission in the near future.

The crew reconnected some cables for the solar panel steering mechanism and closed the hatch a half hour later.

The two spacewalking cosmonauts installed a meteoroid detector in for the upcoming Leonid shower, and hand-launched the Sputnik-41 amateur-radio mini-satellite.

[20] After Fincke egressed, within minutes flight controllers noticed a decrease in pressure in his primary oxygen tank.

The duo successfully repaired a faulty circuit breaker on the space station an hour ahead of schedule.

The crew also installed two antennas to allow the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to communicate with the space station and removed a cable from a faulty television camera.

Padalka completed his sixth career spacewalk on 3 September 2004 when he and Mike Fincke ventured out into space.

[24] He and NASA astronaut Michael Barratt egressed outside the ISS beginning at 7:52 UTC to install docking system antennas and cabling to accommodate the Mini Research Module 2 (MRM-2).

On 10 June 2009 Gennady Padalka and Michael Barratt entered the transfer compartment in the Zvezda module.

[25] The "internal spacewalk" began 10 minutes behind schedule because of initial problems with pressure inside the airlock, which did not fall as fast as expected.

They also completed several get-ahead tasks (since they both opted not to take rests during the night passes) as the duo were about an hour ahead of the timeline.

Padalka and Malenchenko then both ingressed the Pirs Module, prior to closing the hatch and beginning the re-pressurisation procedure, to end a successful spacewalk.

This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.