BAIKONUR SPACEPORT /Kazakhstan/, November 27. /TASS/. The Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft that launched from the Baikonur spaceport at 12:28 p.m. Moscow time (9:28 a.m. GMT) has separated from the Soyuz-2.1a rocket’s booster, a TASS correspondent reported from the space facility.

The spacecraft is carrying members of the 74rd long-duration expedition to the International Space Station (ISS): Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov (expedition commander and TASS special correspondent aboard the ISS) and Sergey Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Williams.

The spacecraft has taken the fast-track, two-orbit rendezvous path to the space station and is expected to dock with the Prichal module of the Russian segment of the ISS at about 3:38 p.m. Moscow time.

Cosmonauts will be assisted in their work by the GigaChat neural network developed by Russia's Sber. The crew is set to spend 242 days in orbit and return to Earth in late July 2026. Their mission will involve over 40 scientific experiments. The first extravehicular activity will be aimed at installing the Solntse-Terahertz equipment for predicting solar flares. During the second spacewalk, the cosmonauts will maintain the Zarya module and replace expired elements. In addition, the offspring of the fruit flies that were taken to space aboard the Bion-M No. 2 spacecraft earlier are now also on a space mission.

The launch is particularly dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the first long-duration expedition to the ISS.