Cristoforetti photographing the Soyuz spacecraft from the space station
“We had a great view of the launch!” Samantha Cristoforetti wrote on Twitter and posted a photo of the Soyuz launch taken by the International Space Station! “I can’t wait to welcome Sergey, Dimitri and Frankie to their new home,” the Italian astronaut from the European Space Agency wrote.
The new crew will have to replace the crew currently on board and consist of seven astronauts; The other four will arrive at the space station on the Crew Dragon shuttle, scheduled for launch on October 3. Russia’s Anna Kekina will fly on the SpaceX shuttle with Americans Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada and Japan’s Koichi Wakata.
While waiting for new colleagues, the next week is expected to be full of appointments: on Sunday 28 it is expected that the current commander of the space station, Oleg Artemyev, will be handed over to Samantha Christofority; Then 30 will be the day of farewell, when Artemyev will leave for Earth with his colleagues Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov.
Meanwhile, the ground test of loading propellant into the SLS (Space Launch System) launcher in Artemis 1, the demonstration mission to return to the Moon, has ended at the Kennedy Space Center. This was announced by NASA, noting that it had achieved all the goals set for the test.
