The Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft with a new crew docked to the ISS
The Soyuz MS-24 manned spacecraft, which was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on Friday, docked to the module of the Russian segment of the ISS, follows from the Roscosmos broadcast.
The deputy head of the Gagarin Space Center, the commander of the Roscosmos cosmonaut detachment Oleg Kononenko, cosmonaut Nikolai Chub, and NASA astronaut Laurel O'Hara arrived at the station on the ship.
O'Hara will return to Earth in the spring of 2024, and the Kononenko and Chub mission will last until September 2024. It is assumed that within the framework of the annual expedition Kononenko may become the first person to stay in space for more than 1 thousand days.
Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Konstantin Borisov, NASA astronauts Francisco Rubio and Jasmine Mogbeli, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa are waiting for the Soyuz MS-24 crew on the ISS.
Prokopyev and Petelin became the record holders for the duration of one flight among Russian citizens within the framework of the International Space Station program, the state corporation said. And NASA astronaut Frank Rubio is now the record holder for the same flight among Americans.
"Rubio surpassed the only NASA record for a space flight of 355 days of continuous stay in space, set by astronaut Mark Vande Hei on March 30, 2022," NASA explained.
As soon as the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft with Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio on board detaches, the 69th expedition will end and the 70th will begin. The crew members of the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft will join the cosmonauts of the crew-7 as part of the new expedition in the usual order of changing the flight step on board the station.
The commander of the Soyuz MS-24 Oleg Kononenko, born in Turkmenabat, graduated from the Zhukovsky Kharkiv Aviation Institute with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1988. Before becoming an astronaut, he worked as an engineer, then as a leading design engineer at the CB TSKB-Progress.
59-year-old Kononenko has made four flights to the ISS, and MS-24 will be his fifth flight. The veteran cosmonaut has four spacewalks on his account, as well as 736 days in space, which is more than any currently active cosmonaut or astronaut.
39-year-old Nikolai Chub and 40-year-old Laurel O'Hara make their first flight into space.
"Although geopolitical tensions in the world are currently high, the United States and the Russian Federation, as partner countries on the ISS, have agreed to continue sending each other's citizens on their spaceships," Nasaspaceflight writes.
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