This Wednesday, a Soyuz capsule carrying two cosmonauts and an astronaut reached the ISS in just over three hours. Unheard of.
American astronaut Kate Rubins of NASA, and the two Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos took off this Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome, before dock their Soyuz to the station's Rassvet module three hours and three minutes later . Typically, these trips take around six hours.
This mission marks the first use by the crew of a new "ultra-fast" flight plan calculated by the Russian agency Roscosmos. This new manned voyage even beat the fastest time for cargo missions, which only transport supplies to the station.
The launch of Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov took place two and a half weeks before the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the first crew of the space station. The Expedition 1 crew, also made up of an American and two Russians – William Shepard, Yuri Lonchakov and Sergei Krikalev – had at the time started their stay on November 2, 2000.
“Twentieth anniversary of a continued human presence in space is going to be quite an event, and I think the three of us are looking forward to it. during this period" , said American astronaut Kate Rubins recently. “I think the ISS is one of the most incredible technical achievements in human history. It's wonderful to see such a machine still persist in space twenty years later. .
Aboard the space station, the three newcomers were greeted by Expedition 63 Commander Chris Cassidy (NASA) and Russian flight engineers Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, on site since April. They will evolve together for seven days , after which the members of Expedition 63 will return to Earth aboard Soyuz MS-16.
During their six-month mission, Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov will conduct several very interesting experiments. “We plan to test tissue bioprinting and cell growth in space, and of course continue our work on DNA sequencing” , explained Kate Rubins. It was she who, in 2016, became the first astronaut to sequence DNA in space.
The three members of the new Expedition 64 will also be joined soon by the crew of the Crew-1 mission , of SpaceX and its four occupants. American astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi were normally scheduled to take off on Halloween. Eventually, their flight was delayed in mid-November as SpaceX fixed an engine problem leading to the abandonment of one of its launches on October 2.
