Latest Space Station crew docks in record time following successful launch
- by Carmen Reese
- in Science
- — Nov 25, 2020
The new Expedition 64 is said to begin on Oct 21, Wednesday, with the coming departure of Vagner, Ivanishin, and also Cassidy in the known Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft that previously brought them to the known space station back on April 9.
According to Roscosmos, the fastest a spacecraft has ever reached the ISS is 3 hours 19 minutes.
The Soyuz MS-17 mission took off today, which saw three astronauts launched up to the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month mission. The Russian cosmonauts Serguei Rizhikov and Sergei Kud-Sdedchikov, as well as the NASA US astronaut Kathleen Rubins make up the first space crew after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, for which hygiene measures were tightened. Wednesday's crewed venture even beat the quickest an ideal opportunity for missions simply conveying supplies to the station.
Ahead of the launch, the NASA astronaut had expressed her excitement to Space.com. Just an uncrewed Progress freight space transport has recently utilized this profile which requires only two circles before docking.
"We're planning to try some really interesting things like bio-printing tissues and growing cells in space and, of course, continuing our work on sequencing DNA", Rubins said.
Speaking during Tuesday's pre-launch news conference at Baikonur, Rubins emphasized that the crew spent weeks in quarantine at the Star City training facility outside Moscow and then on Baikonur to avoid any threat from the coronavirus.
This is cosmonaut Kud-Sverchkov's first flight into space and he is Flight Engineer 1.
In November, NASA and SpaceX will launch the first operational mission to the ISS on the "Crew Dragon" capsule.
Normally, it would take twice as long for a crew to reach the space station orbiting 250 miles above Earth. NASA said that that spacecraft was also launched from Kazakhstan.
