The Roscosmos Soyuz MS-26 crew. Left to right: NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. (Image credit: Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center)
The Roscosmos Soyuz MS-26 crew. Left to right: NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. (Image credit: Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center)
A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts will launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) today (Sept. 11), and you can watch the action live.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit will join Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which will lift off atop a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today at 12:23 p.m. EDT (1623 GMT; 9:23 p.m. local Baikonur time). The trio will join the Expedition 71 crew for a half-year mission aboard the ISS.
Today’s Soyuz MS-26 launch will stream live here at Space.com, via NASA+ (formerly NASA Television). Coverage begins at 11:15 a.m. EDT (1515 GMT). NASA will also broadcast the Soyuz’s planned 3:33 p.m. EDT (1933 GMT) docking with the ISS starting at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT), and the 5:50 p.m. EDT (2150 GMT) hatch opening between the two spacecraft, beginning at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT).
Each crewmember has flown to space before. This will be Pettit’s fourth launch and will add to his accumulated total of 370 days in space, according to NASA statistics. His first mission, Expedition 6, was expected to last 2.5 months in space after a launch Nov. 23, 2002 on space shuttle Endeavour’s STS-113 mission.
The landing was delayed to May 3, 2003, however, after the shuttle fleet was grounded in the wake of the space shuttle Columbia disaster that took place on Feb. 1, 2003, killing seven astronauts. Pettit’s arrival on Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft was safe, but eventful: a malfunction caused the spacecraft to land 295 miles (475 kilometers) off target, causing a lengthy delay for ground teams to reach the crew.
Related: 3 spaceflyers arrive at the ISS aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft
Pettit also flew to space on the shuttle mission STS-126 in November 2008, and (aboard Soyuz TMA-03M) with ISS Expeditions 30 and 31 from Dec. 21, 2011 to July 1, 2012.
Ovchinin’s launches have all been aboard Soyuz. His previous missions include ISS Expeditions 47 and 48 in 2016, the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft launch on Oct. 11, 2018 that aborted safely after a rocket problem, and Expeditions 59 and 60 in 2019 — a successful retry for Ovchinin following that abort.
Vagner’s previous launch was aboard Soyuz, for Expeditions 62 and 63, in 2020.
