NASA astronaut Anil Menon has flown to the International Space Station along with Russian astronauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina.
A Russian Soyuz-2.1a rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 17:48 Moscow time to deliver a new crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Russia’s Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft is expected to dock with the ISS at 20:56 Moscow time. On board are Russian astronauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina along with NASA astronaut Anil Menon.
The crew is expected to spend 261 days in the space station. The Russian program for astronauts includes 38 scientific experiments as well as two space shuttles.
Menon is traveling to the ISS as part of a spaceflight agreement between the US and Russia. The agreement, signed in 2022, allows Russian astronauts to fly aboard the American Crew Dragon spacecraft and American astronauts to fly aboard the Russian Soyuz MS spacecraft. Kikina had already traveled to the ISS on the SpaceX Endurance capsule in 2022.
The Russians previously used American spacecraft for space travel between 1994 and 2002, when NASA’s Space Shuttle program was still active. The first such joint mission allowed American astronauts to visit Russia’s Mir space station as part of the Shuttle-Mir program, while others involved flights to the ISS. NASA terminated the Shuttle program in 2011 and had to rely on Roscosmos to transport astronauts to the space station until 2020.
