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Soyuz MS-24 crew arrives at Baikonur for pre-launch preparations — TASS’ ISS correspondent

The main crew of the 70th and 71st expedition to the ISS includes cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolay Chub as well as NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara

ZVEZDNY GORODOK /Moscow Region/, August 29. /TASS/. The main and backup crews of the manned Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft have left State Space Corporation Roscosmos’ Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center for the Baikonur spaceport to undergo pre-launch training, a TASS correspondent reported.

Oleg Kononenko, the Soyuz commander and future TASS special correspondent on the International Space Station (ISS), told reporters that the crew members have developed a strong rapport among themselves. "Of course we are ready [for the flight], we are eager to travel [to the ISS]," Kononenko emphasized.

The main crew of the 70th and 71st expedition to the ISS includes cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolay Chub as well as NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara. Their doubles are cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson. The crews traveled by bus to the Chkalovsky airfield near Moscow, from where they will be flown to the Baikonur cosmodrome.

The Soyuz MS-24 manned transport spacecraft is scheduled to be launched on September 15. O'Hara will return to Earth on Soyuz MS-24 in the spring of 2024, while Kononenko and Chub's mission will last until September 2024, after which the cosmonauts will return to Earth on Soyuz MS-25. As part of the one-year expedition, Kononenko could become the first person on Earth to spend more than a thousand days in space.

On July 15, 2022, Roscosmos announced the signing of an agreement on joint cross-flights of Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts to the ISS, which includes three flights of Russians on American spacecraft. In March 2023, the state space corporation announced that the cross-flight program had been extended by one more mission.

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