Sept. 25 (UPI) — The Soyuz rocket and crew capsule are ready and waiting to carry three new crew members to the International Space Station. The gantry arms have been removed and officials are preparing for the countdown at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The crewed mission is scheduled for blastoff at 9:57 a.m. EDT Wednesday. The launch will be broadcast live on NASA TV, with coverage starting at 9 a.m.
Oleg Skripochka, a 49-year-old cosmonaut with two spaceflights under his belt, will serve as the Soyuz commander of the Expedition 61 flight. Skripochka will be joined on the flight by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, 42, and Hazzaa Ali Almansoori, 35, of the United Arab Emirates.
Wednesday’s flight will feature a pair of firsts.
The four-orbit, six-hour journey will be Meir’s first. The former assistant professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School will serve as flight engineer. Meir, a native of Maine, previously worked for Lockheed Martin as a human physiology researcher. She has a degree in biology from Brown University and a doctorate in marine biology from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Almansoori will be the first-ever space traveler from the UAE.
“Almansoori is flying on an eight-day mission as a spaceflight participant under a contract between the UAE and Roscosmos,” according to NASA.
The trio of space travelers are scheduled to arrive and dock at the station’s Zvezda service module at 3:45 p.m. NASA TV’s live coverage of the docking process will begin at 3 p.m.
“About two hours after docking, hatches between the Soyuz and the station will open and the new residents will be greeted by station commander Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Nick Hague and Andrew Morgan, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov,” according to NASA.
For a week, the space station will be a bit more crowded than usual, with a population of nine. The crew members will get a bit more room to stretch out come Oct. 3, when Hague and Ovchinin head back to Earth after 200 days in space.
The duo will be joined on the flight home by Almansoori, whose stay will be a bit shorter than most astronauts.