A few hours ago, the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and after a little more than three hours reached the International Space Station with three new crew members on board. It docked with the Station’s Rassvet module. As is becoming increasingly common for crewed trips as well, the ultra-fast track was used which halves the journey duration.
The three new members of the crew of the International Space Station, who complete the last phase of Expedition 71 are:
Aleksey Ovchinin. Born on September 28, 1971, in Rybinsk, in the then USSR and now in Russia, he graduated as a pilot at the Yeisk Higher Military Pilot School and then served as a pilot instructor and later as a commander of an aviation unit of the 70th Separate Test Training Aviation Regiment of Special Purpose (OITAPON). In 2006 he was selected as a cosmonaut candidate. In 2013 he participated in ESA’s CAVES 2013 training mission spending six days in the Sa Grutta caves, in Sardinia, Italy. He already served on the International Space Station as part of Expedition 47/48 coming back to Earth on September 7, 2016. He’s married and has one daughter. It was supposed to be part of the Expedition 57/58 but the October 11, 2018 launch was aborted and he went back to the Station in March 2019 as part of Expedition 59/60.
Ivan Viktorovitch Vagner. Born on July 10, 1985, in Severoonezhsk, in the then USSR and today in Russia, in 2008 he earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. At that time he worked as an engineer-designer for JSC Klimov and subsequently for RKK Energija. In 2010 he was selected as a cosmonaut candidate. He already served on the International Space Station between April and October 2020 as part of Expedition 62/63.
Donald Roy Pettit. Born on April 20, 1955, in Silverton, Oregon, USA, he earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Oregon State University in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Arizona in 1983. After working for some years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 1996 he was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA. In 2002, he participated in the STS-113 mission on the Space Shuttle Discovery, becoming part of Expedition 7 to the International Space Station, returning to Earth in May 2003 on the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft. In November 2008, he participated in the STS-126 mission on the Space Shuttle Endeavour, spending 15 days in orbit. He returned to the International Space Station as part of Expedition 30/31 between December 2011 and July 2012.
The three new crew members will spend about six months on the International Space Station. While two more crew members will arrive on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, there are 19 people in Earth orbit, including the crew of China’s Tiangong space station and the four crew members of the private space mission Polaris Dawn. This sets a new record.
