A Russian Soyuz spacecraft will send an American astronaut and two cosmonauts to the International Space Station early Friday (April 9) – and you can watch it live online.
The Soyuz capsule with NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov is expected to launch on Friday at 03:42 EDT (0742 GMT or 12:42 local time) on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a quick, three-hour drive to the International Space Station.
You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency. Launch coverage begins at 2:45 a.m. EDT (0745 GMT).
Video: Astronaut Mark Vande Hei dishes at last minute spaceflight
If all goes according to plan, the trio’s spacecraft will arrive at the space station around 07:07 EDT (1107 GMT). The coverage of the event will begin at 06:15 EDT (1015 GMT). NASA will also note the proceeds for the opening of the hatch and the crew or flight controller, which is expected to take place around 08:30 EDT (1230 GMT).
This mission will be the second spaceflight for Vande Hei, the third for Soyuz commander Novitskiy and the first for Dubrov.
NASA announced Vande Hei’s involvement in this mission only last month. Crew members for long-range space station missions usually receive years of knowledge, but NASA’s Quick Vande Hi after the agency’s plans to move to commercial crewing were complicated by ongoing technical problems with Boeing’s Starliner astronaut taxi, which could delay the vehicle’s first crew flight until 2022.
(Like Boeing, SpaceX holds a contract with NASA’s commercial crew program. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is underway and has already transported two crew members to orbit.)
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Vande Hei did have knowledge of the flight before the public announcement, he said Space.com in an exclusive interview. “I prepared for this flight as something we did as a contingency, just in case we could get the seat,” he said.
NASA usually buys seats aboard the Soyuz. But in this case, NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, instead agreed to exchange seats – Vande Hei’s on the Soyuz for a designated Roscosmos astronaut on a future commercial crew flight. Flight allocations are still being determined as NASA works out the kinks with the planning of commercial crews, and Vande Hei can therefore spend a year rather than the usual six months in space. But it has not yet been completely decided.
“Things are changing and … we need to coordinate with the Russians, especially Roscosmos, to find out when we need to come back,” Vande Hei told Space.com.
His previous spaceflight lasted six months. So Vande Hei said he would look forward to a new ‘life experience’ if given the task of staying afloat for a year.
The three-person Soyuz MS-18 crew will join and take care of seven Expedition 64 spacecraft currently in orbit one of the greatest teams in recent memory. The seven people who were already there arrived on two spaceships last year. A Soyuz brought NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and astronauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to the station in October. Then a SpaceX Crew Dragon sent NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as the Japanese Soichi Noguchi, to the orbit in November.
Friday’s launch will take place three days before the 60th anniversary of the first human spaceflight, from the same location where the historic getaway was presented. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union Yuri Gagarin launched from the Baikonur orbit to Earth. The Russian space agency Roscosmos named the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft Gagarin after the famous astronaut.
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