NASA astronaut, two cosmonauts set for Friday release to house station

Engineers readied a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for release Friday to hold a veteran cosmonaut commander, a rookie co-pilot and a NASA astronaut on a flight to the World Area Station.

NASA’s Loral O’Hara, making her first house flight, veteran commander Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub are scheduled for liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:44 a.m. EDT (8:44 p.m. native time) Friday.

The launching was once timed to arrange a fast-track three-hour, 11-minute rendezvous with the gap station and if all is going smartly, the Soyuz MS-24/70S ferry send will dock on the Earth-facing port of the Russian Rassvet module at 2:56 p.m.

Kononenko, Chub and O’Hara are changing some other Soyuz team — commander Sergey Prokopyev, co-pilot Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio — who have been introduced to the station closing September. They plan to go back to Earth on Sept. 27 to wrap up a longer 371-day undertaking, the longest unmarried house flight but by means of an American astronaut.

The trio at first anticipated to return house in March, however their flight was once stretched out an extra six months after their Soyuz MS-22/68S spacecraft was once disabled by means of a coolant leak closing December. They are going to now come again to Earth aboard a alternative Soyuz introduced closing February.

Because it seems, Kononenko and Chub plan to spend a complete yr aboard the station as smartly whilst O’Hara’s excursion of responsibility will closing six months.

To get everybody up and down as required, the Russians plan to release a so-called “taxi” flight subsequent March when veteran commander Oleg Novitskiy, NASA’s Tracy Dyson and Belarus researcher Marina Vasilevskaya ship a contemporary ferry send to the station.

Novitskiy, Vasilevskaya and O’Hara then will go back to Earth about 10 days later aboard the similar Soyuz that carries O’Hara aloft on Friday. Kononenko, Chub and Dyson will stay in orbit till subsequent September, coming house aboard the Soyuz MS-25/71S Soyuz that shall be delivered by means of Novitskiy.

William Harwood

Invoice Harwood has been protecting the U.S. house program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau leader for United Press World and now as a expert for CBS Information. He lined 129 house travel missions, each interplanetary flight since Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune and ratings of business and army launches. Based totally on the Kennedy Area Middle in Florida, Harwood is a loyal newbie astronomer and co-author of “Comm Test: The Ultimate Flight of Go back and forth Columbia.”