Two Russian cosmonauts have left Earth to spend a year aboard the International Space Station, flying with an American crewmate who will return home in six months.
Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos and Loral O’Hara of NASA launched together on the Russian Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft on Friday (September 15). The three lifted off at 11:44 a.m. EDT (3:44 p.m. GMT or 8:44 p.m. local time) aboard a Soyuz 2.1a rocket from Site 31/6 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
A trio of small stuffed seagulls served as a zero-gravity indicator for the crew, starting to float when the Soyuz entered orbit about nine minutes after leaving Earth. The seagulls were a gift from the director of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, which Kononenko visited before the launch.
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“I am convinced that this will truly become a tradition: a visit [the] theater before space flight,” said Kononenko, whose callsign is “Antares,” according to Russian state news agency TASS. In addition to the seagulls, Kononenko also waved a flag and a fragment of a curtain to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the Theatre.
The launch was timed to put the Soyuz on an accelerated path to the International Space Station (ISS), with the crew set to arrive and dock at the Rassvet mini-research module at around 2.56pm EDT (1856 GMT), after just one rendezvous on two orbits.
Once they arrive at the space station, Kononenko, Chub and O’Hara will join the Expedition 69 crew led by Commander Sergey Prokopyev with Roscosmos cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio and Jasmin Moghbeli, of the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen and astronaut Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Expedition 70 will begin with the scheduled September 27 departure of Soyuz MS-23 carrying Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio.
Kononenko and Chub will spend twice as much time in space as O’Hara to allow for a brief visit from Marina Vasileyeva, a former flight attendant selected to represent the Republic of Belarus, flying on the Soyuz MS-25 under an agreement with Roscosmos. After about a week at the station, Vasileyeva returned to Earth with O’Hara and Soyuz MS-25 commander Oleg Novitsky. NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson will launch with Novitsky and Vasileyeva and return to Earth with Kononenko and Chub on Soyuz MS-25.
If Kononenko and Chub’s stay lasts 365 days or more, they will be the eighth and ninth Russians to live for a year in space and the third and fourth cosmonauts to do so on the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who is landing on Soyuz MS-23, is the first and only American to spend a year or more in space, with a total of 371 days he returns to Earth.
During their time on the space station, Kononenko, Chub, and O’Hara will see the arrival and departure of numerous visiting vehicles, perform maintenance and spacewalks (extravehicular activities, or EVA) to keep the orbital complex running and help conduct hundreds of scientific experiments.
“We expect to hit the ground running,” O’Hara said during a pre-launch press conference. “We’re going to be very busy. We have two EVAs in mid-October that we’re all very excited about, and then we’ll have a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship [arriving]and that always keeps us very busy with a lot of science.”
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An engineer who worked on spacecraft design before becoming a cosmonaut in 1996, Kononenko, 59, is on his fifth mission to the International Space Station. Kononenko’s previous stays include Expedition 17 in 2008, Expedition 30/31 in 2012, Expedition 44/45 in 2015 and Expedition 57/58/59 in 2019. Before Friday’s launch, he had already spent more than 736 days in space. When he returns from this mission, he will have spent more time in space than any other human in history, with more than 1,000 days under his belt.
Chub, 39, is on his first space flight. Before being selected as a cosmonaut in 2012, he ran an astronautics company, participated in ESA’s CAVES training program and was a member of the reserve crew for Soyuz MS-12 and MS-22.
O’Hara, 40, worked on rocket and submarine development before being named to NASA’s 22nd astronaut group, “The Turtles,” in 2017. O’Hara is the second astronaut to fly on a Russian spacecraft Soyuz as part of a seat-swapping agreement between Roscosmos and NASA.
“I have dreamed of exploration since I was a child. It was simply something I was interested in doing and from an early age spaceflight captured my imagination. From there, I have always been interested in challenging activities, distant places, studying our planet and learning new things. So, for me, spaceflight encompasses all of that in a really incredible phase,” O’Hara said.
Soyuz MS-24 is the 70th Russian Soyuz to launch to the International Space Station since 2000 and the 153rd to fly since 1967.
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