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Seven astronauts and cosmonauts are preparing for launches on April 9 and 22 to the International Space Station, replacing seven outgoing crew members who are scheduled to land in Kazakhstan and off the coast of Florida on April 17 and 28.
Consecutive crew rotations will be a busy month on the orbit research complex. Preparations for the arrival of the new crew members are already underway on the space station.
The first will be the move of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to a new docking port on the space station on Monday. NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, commander of the Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft, will be joined by teammates Victor Glover, Soichi Noguchi and Shannon Walker for the 45-minute fully automated relocation maneuver.
The Dragon astronauts, who launched on November 15 as part of SpaceX’s “Crew-1” mission, will be aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft and will be ready for re-entry, just in case the capsule struggles to fit. connect with the new docking port. and must return to Earth.
The Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft will detach from the space station’s Harmony module front port and fly to a position above the outpost, then move to dock with a port on top of the Harmony module. The move will pave the way for the next Crew Dragon mission to connect with the space station’s forward-facing port.
Once the Crew-1 mission leaves the station at the end of April, the upward-facing docking port will be freed for the arrival of a Dragon freighter in June. This mission will deliver new solar panels to the space station, and docking above the Harmony module gives the station’s robotic arm the ability to reach the hold of the Dragon capsule to extract the solar panels.
The next step is the launch of a Russian Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft with Commander Oleg Novitskiy, Cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrovnik and NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei. The Soyuz crew are scheduled to take off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 9 at 3:42 a.m. EDT (7:42 a.m. GMT).
Novitskiy, 49, will launch his third expedition to the space station after spending 340 days in orbit on his two previous missions. Vande Hei, 54, is a retired U.S. Army colonel who spent 168 days in orbit on a space station mission in 2017 and 2018. Doubrov, 43, is preparing for his first trip to the ‘space.
The Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft will embark on a fast-track rendezvous with the space station, using a perfectly timed takeoff from Baikonur to quickly approach the orbiting complex for docking at 7:07 a.m. EDT (11:07 a.m. GMT ).
The space station’s crew will temporarily increase to 10 people until the crew exiting the Soyuz MS-17 leaves the research lab a week later.
Undocking of the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft with Commander Sergey Ryzhikov, Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA Astronaut Kate Rubins is scheduled for 9:33 p.m. EDT on April 16 (0133 GMT April 17). The Soyuz capsule is expected to parachute into a landing in the steppes of Kazakhstan at 12:56 a.m. EDT (12:56 a.m. GMT) on April 17.
Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins launched on October 14 from Baikonur. Their return to Earth on April 17 will close a 185-day mission.
Once the Soyuz crew rotation is complete, SpaceX and NASA will be cleared to launch the second Crew Dragon operational mission to the space station on April 22.
The Crew Dragon Endeavor spacecraft, refurbished after launching with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on a test flight last year, is ready for takeoff from Station 39A at the Kennedy Space Center from NASA in Florida at 6:11 a.m. EDT (1011 GMT) on April 22.
A fully experienced crew will soar into space above a Falcon 9 launcher powered by a reused first-stage booster, which SpaceX recovered after Crew-1 took off last November.
NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough, a 53-year-old former Army helicopter pilot, is the Crew-2 mission commander. He is a veteran of two previous space missions, including a flight on the space shuttle Endeavor in 2008 and a long-term expedition to the space station in 2016 and 2017.
The Crew-2 pilot is Megan McArthur, 49, who has a space shuttle flight in her career. McArthur was an oceanographer before his selection as a NASA astronaut. She flew on Space Shuttle Atlantis during a Hubble Space Telescope maintenance mission in 2009. This will be her first mission to the International Space Station.
Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and French European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet will also participate in the Crew-2 mission. Hoshide, 52, is an aerospace engineer with decades of experience in the Japanese space program. This is his third space flight, after a mission on the space shuttle Discovery in 2008 and then spent four months on the space station in 2012.
Pesquet is a 43-year-old former Air France airline pilot with a previous trip to the space station to his credit. He lived and worked on the space station in 2016 and 2017, flying to the complex on the same Soyuz mission as Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, who will arrive at the station two weeks before the Crew-2 mission dock later this this month.
Assuming the Crew-2 mission takes off on April 22, Kimbrough and his teammates will reach the space station for an automated docking at 5:29 a.m. EDT (9:29 a.m. GMT) on April 23.
Their arrival will begin a five-day transfer with the Crew-1 astronauts, when the space station will briefly accommodate 11 crew members.
Crew 1 astronauts are scheduled to board their Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft and undock from the space station on April 28 at 5 a.m. EDT (9 a.m. GMT). The Crew Dragon capsule will fire its Draco thrusters to target a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of Florida at 12:35 a.m. EDT (4:35 p.m. GMT) the same day.
NASA and SpaceX officials conducted an operations readiness review on Monday to confirm target dates for the launch and docking of Crew-2, as well as the return of the Crew-1 mission to Earth. A flight readiness review on April 15 will officially set the launch date for the Crew-2 mission.
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