In a sign that international cooperation isn’t completely dead, Soyuz MS-22 launched from Kazakhstan carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in the early morning of September 21.

Russian cosmonaut Sergei Prokopyev was the only experienced member of the crew as well as the Soyuz Commander. For the other two astronauts – NASA’s Frank Rubio and Roscosmos’s Dmitry Petelin – this was their first trip into space. Dr. Rubio was selected as an astronaut in 2017. Dmitry was selected in 2012.

Three and a half hours after launch, their Soyuz autonomously docked to the Rassvet module on the nadir or Earth-facing side of the Russian segment of the station. The crew will stay on the ISS for the standard six-month rotation before returning home. The crew they replace – Soyuz MS-21 – will come back a week after Soyuz MS-22 arrives. The total crew on the station will therefore be ten, temporarily.

In further good news, the next NASA crew rotation on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, Crew 5, is currently scheduled for early October of this year and will have a Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina on board. She will become only the fifth Russian female professional astronaut, the sixth Russian woman overall to go into space, and the first Russian to fly on an American spacecraft since STS-113 in 2002.

More Information

New Crew Launching to Station Live on NASA TV (NASA Blogs)

New Crew Enters Station and Begins Six-Month Mission (NASA Blogs)