ESA, Roscosmos and NASA will be covering the next launch of a Soyuz rocket (now famously the most used launch vehicle in the world) bringing Sergei Volkov of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Andreas Mogensen of ESA (European Space Agency) and Aidyn Aimbetov of the Kazakh Space Agency to the INternational Space Station to join the Mission 44 crew – Commander Gennady Padalka, Scott Kelly, Mikhail Kornienko, Oleg Kononenko, Kjell Lindgren (recent Worldcon Astronaut Guest) and Kimiya Yui – already aboard.
This will be the first time since 2013 that a compliment of 9 astronauts will be aboard the space station.
The crew on board the ISS had to move one of the docked Soyuz spacecraft to a new location in order to make room for the arrival of the latest crew. Read more about that here. (Video of a similar move can be watched here.)
The Mission 45 crew will dock with the ISS on Friday.
Watch the launch here.
