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Medics find Russian cosmonauts fit for flying on Crew Dragon to ISS

Roscosmos cosmonauts Kikina and Fedyayev will go to the ISS as part of Crew Dragon crews under a cross-flight agreement

MOSCOW, August 23. /TASS/. The Chief Medical Commission has found Russian cosmonauts Anna Kikina and Andrey Fedyayev fit to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) on the US spacecraft Crew Dragon, the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center said on Tuesday.

Roscosmos cosmonauts Kikina and Fedyayev will go to the ISS as part of Crew Dragon crews under a cross-flight agreement.

The CTC added that the rest of the ISS-68 crew, due to leave for the orbital outpost in September, were also in good health. "The commission found that Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin (the main ISS-68 crew) and Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub (standby crew) were recognized as fit for space flight," the CTC added.

On July 15, Roscosmos announced the signing of an agreement on joint cross-flights by Russian cosmonauts and US astronauts to the ISS. Russians will fly on US spacecraft thrice. Crew Dragon’s Crew-5 mission involving Kikina is due no earlier than September 29. Cosmonaut Andrey Fedyayev will fly to the ISS on the sixth Crew Dragon spacecraft. His standby is Konstantin Borisov, who will also be trained for the Crew-7 mission in 2024. Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin will go to the ISS on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is scheduled to blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 21.

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