Three inhabitants of the International Space Station will take a spin around their orbital neighborhood in the Soyuz MS-17 on Friday, March 19, moving the rocket to get ready for the appearance of the next set of crew individuals. Live coverage on NASA Television, the NASA application, and the agency’s website will start at 12:15 p.m. EDT.
Expedition 64 Flight Engineer Kate Rubins of NASA and Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, both of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, will undock from the Earth-confronting port of the station’s Rassvet module at 12:38 p.m. and dock again at the space-confronting Poisk docking port at 1:07 p.m.
The migration will let loose the Rassvet port for the docking of another Soyuz vehicle, assigned Soyuz MS-18, which will carry three Expedition 65 crew members to the station one month from now. NASA’s Mark Vande Hei and Roscosmos’ Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov are booked to launch to the station Friday, April 9, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
This will be the 15th overall Soyuz port migration and the first since August 2019.
Rubins, Ryzhikov, and Kud-Sverchkov will get back to Earth on April 17 in the Soyuz MS-17 that carried them to the space station in October 2020.
