NASA coverage now is underway for the launch of a crewed Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station with NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus.
The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9:21 a.m. EDT (6:21 p.m. Baikonur time). Coverage of launch and docking activities will air live on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.
After a two-orbit, three-hour journey, the Soyuz will dock to the space station’s Prichal module at 12:39 p.m. Shortly after, hatches between the Soyuz and the station will open and the crew members will greet each other.
Once aboard station, the trio will join Expedition 70 crew members including NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Alexander Grebenkin.
Dyson will spend six months aboard the station as an Expedition 70 and 71 flight engineer, returning to Earth in September with Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub of Roscosmos, who will complete a year-long mission on the laboratory.
Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya will be aboard the station for 12 days, providing the ride home for O’Hara on Tuesday, April 2, aboard Soyuz MS-24 for a parachute-assisted landing on steppe of Kazakhstan. O’Hara will have spent 200 days in space when she returns.
NASA coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and are subject to change based on real-time operations):
Thursday, March 21
- 9:21 a.m. – Launch
- 11:30 a.m. – Rendezvous and docking coverage begins
- 12:39 p.m. – Docking
- 2:50 p.m. – Hatch opening and welcome remarks coverage begins
Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
Get weekly updates from NASA Johnson Space Center at: https://roundupreads.jsc.nasa.gov/
Get the latest from NASA delivered every week. Subscribe here: www.nasa.gov/subscribe
