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Government commission at Baikonur approves crew of new expedition to ISS

The main crew are Roscosmos’s Alexander Ovchinin and NASA’s Nick Hague and Christina Koch

BAIKONUR /Kazakhstan/, March 13. /TASS/. A government commission at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan has approved a new crew for a prolonged expedition on the International Space Station (ISS), scheduled to go in space on the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft on March 14, the Russian space corporation Roscosmos told the media on Wednesday.

"Roscosmos’s Alexander Ovchinin and NASA’s Nick Hague and Christina Koch are the main crew," Roscosmos said.

Their mission will lasts 204 days. Roscosmos’s Alexander Skvortsov, NASA’s Andrew Morgan and the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano are the standby team. They were in reserve when the ISS-58/59 space expedition went to the ISS on December 3.

Ovchinin, Hague and Koch (expedition ISS-59/60) will leave for the space station at 22:14 on March 14. Originally Ovchinin and Hague were to arrive at the ISS back in October 2018. The October 11 launch had to be aborted due to the failure of the Soyuz-FG rocket. The emergency rescue system was activated. The crew was not hurt.

An inquiry found that the incident was due to sloppy assembly at Baikonur.

Earlier, a source in the space rocket industry told TASS a sensor of Ukrainian manufacture had to be replaced when the Soyuz-FG rocket due to blast off on March 14 was tested.

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