He'll blast off in a Russian capsule, and after it docks with the space station, he'll be able to shake hands with Sergei Volkov, the first child of a Russian cosmonaut to go up.
After a two-day journey aboard the Soyuz capsule, the crew will dock with the space station, overlapping briefly with the current crew - station commander Mike Fossum of Nasa, Japan's Satoshi Furukawa and Russia's Sergei Volkov - who will then return to earth.