This afternoon at 4:31 p.m. ET, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft will launch on the second ever direct flight to the International Space Station. The crew consists of NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano, and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and will launch to space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It is expected that the crew take approximately 6 hours to dock at the ISS.
The mission is to join fellow Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin as well as NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who have manned the space station since March, and to eventually relieve them of their stay. Yurchikhin will subsequently assume command. The current crew is scheduled to return to Earth in September, while the crew going up this afternoon will return in November.
What many might consider to be a routine space flight is actually only the second attempt at the specific way the crew will be launching. Luca Parmitano said in a pre-flight NASA interview.
“We will be doing four-orbit rendezvous, a quick rendezvous, it’s so-called. Instead of waiting in orbit for two days before docking to the station after launch, right after launch we will get the spacecraft ready to just inject in higher orbit and then dock on the station, only six hours after launch.”
The only other crew to perform space travel in this precise manner is the one currently living on the ISS. Before them, this method was only practiced with unmanned spacecrafts.
Nyberg, the only American on this 3-person crew, is no stranger to the ISS having made the trek back in 2008 and stayed for 14 days. Though two weeks in space may seem like a good chunk of time to us Earth-dwellers, to Nyberg it was a mere instant. She told Space.com, “I visited space station in 2008 on the space shuttle Discovery, and it was a very, very quick trip, only 14 days, and honestly, I don’t really remember a lot of it because it just flew by so fast.”
Best of luck to the crew and here’s hoping for a safe return home in September and November.
Check out the live stream Soyuz spacecraft launch:
