Three folks will launch towards the Worldwide House Station on Tuesday (July 14), and you may watch the motion stay.
NASA’s Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina are scheduled to carry off atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1347 GMT; 7:47 p.m. native time in Baikonur).
You possibly can watch it stay right here at House.com, courtesy of NASA, or straight via the space agency’s YouTube channel. Protection will start at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1245 GMT).
The trio, flying in Russia’s Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft, will catch as much as the Worldwide House Station (ISS) after simply two orbits, docking with the outpost at about 1:56 p.m. EDT (1746 GMT).
You possibly can watch rendezvous and arrival right here at House.com as properly, starting at 1:10 p.m. EDT (1710 GMT). There can be a little bit of a break after docking, then protection will resume at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT) forward of the opening of the hatches between the Soyuz and the ISS, which is predicted round 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT).
The MS-29 trio will be part of the seven astronauts already dwelling aboard the ISS — NASA’s Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, the European House Company’s Sophie Adenot, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian house company Roscosmos.
This will be the first spaceflight for Menon, who was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in December 2021, in the agency’s Group 23. He’s married to Anna Menon, who was picked in the next astronaut candidate class, Group 24, in September 2025.
Anna Menon has already been to space, though not with NASA. In September 2024, while an employee of SpaceX, she flew on the company’s Polaris Dawn mission to Earth orbit. That five-day flight, which was funded and commanded by current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, featured the first-ever commercial spacewalk and reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers) — higher than any previous crewed Earth-orbiting mission had gotten.
Anil Menon is a former SpaceX-er as well; he was the company’s first-ever flight surgeon.
MS-29’s flight will be the second-ever space mission for both Dubrov and Kikina. Dubrov lived aboard the ISS from April 2021 to March 2022, and Kikina spend five months on the outpost, from October 2022 to March 2023.
Kikina, the only female member of Russia’s active astronaut corps, flew to and from the ISS back then on SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission. That was a big deal: She was the first Russian ever to fly on a private U.S. spacecraft, and the first cosmonaut to fly on any American space vehicle since December 2002, when cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Sergey Treshchov came back to Earth from the ISS aboard the space shuttle Endeavour.
The MS-29 trio will spend about eight months living and working on the orbiting lab. Menon will help conduct a wide variety of scientific experiments during that stretch.
“He will continue research to refine in-space production of semiconductor crystals to enable the large-scale manufacturing of components needed for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, and improved medical devices,” NASA officials wrote in a July 9 media advisory.
“Menon additionally will carry out ultrasound utilizing augmented actuality and synthetic intelligence strategies that might get rid of the necessity for medical assist from Earth on future house missions,” they added.
