NASA's Dyson Will Spend Six Months Aboard The Station As An Expedition 70 And 71 Flight Engineer

It's about to get crowded aboard the ISS... Three crew members including NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson successfully launched at 8:36 a.m. EDT Saturday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station. 

Dyson, along with her crewmates Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus, will dock to the space station’s Prichal module at about 11:09 a.m. on Monday, March 25, on the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft.

When the hatches between the station and the Soyuz open about 1:40 p.m., the new crew members will join NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Alexander Grebenkin, already living and working aboard the space station.

Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya will be aboard the station for 12 days, before providing the ride home for O’Hara on Saturday, April 6, aboard Soyuz MS-24 for a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan.

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. This will be the third spaceflight for Dyson, the fourth for Novitskiy, and the first for Vasilevskaya.

FMI: www.nasa.gov/station