NASA astronaut, two cosmonauts take Thanksgiving Day ride to space station – Spaceflight Now

Astronomer turned medical physicist and now NASA astronaut Chris Williams joined two Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz spacecraft Thursday for a Thanksgiving Day flight to the International Space Station, planning an eight-month stay in orbit.

With Commander Sergei Kud-Sverchkov at the controls of the Soyuz MS-28/74S spacecraft, flight engineer Sergei Mikaev on his left, and Williams on his right, the crew’s Soyuz 2.1A booster activated at 4:27 a.m. EST and smoothly lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Nine minutes and 45 seconds later, the Soyuz spacecraft was released from the booster’s upper stage, its two solar wings opened, and the crew took off after the space station. The automated two-orbit rendezvous ended with docking at the laboratory’s Earth-facing Rasvet module at 7:34 a.m.

Williams, a one-time volunteer combat fighter and Ph.D. Emergency Medical Technician with. in astrophysics from MIT, he was a board-certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School when he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021.

He and flight engineer Mikaev are making their first space flight, while Kud-Sverchkov is a seasoned veteran who will spend 185 days aboard the space station in 2020-2021.

“It’s a really great crew,” Williams said in a NASA interview. “Sergei and Sergei are both absolutely wonderful people, really kind, extremely interested, extremely intellectually curious, which is really fun. Had a lot of, really great discussions, just chatting and talking about things.

“It’s been amazing to be able to spend some time with him in Star City and spend some time with him in Houston through our training.”

The Soyuz MS-28 crew is replacing Soyuz MS-27/73s Commander Sergei Razikov, Flight Engineer Alexey Zubritsky and NASA astronaut Johnny Kim, who were launched to the space station last April 7. They plan to return to Earth in early December to complete their eight-month stay.

Also on hand to welcome Williams and his crew to the ISS are NASA Crew 11 commander Jenna Cardman, Michael Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and astronaut Oleg Platonov. They launched last August aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and plan to home in February or March after their replacement – ​​Crew 12 – arrives.

All 11 station astronauts planned to gather in Moscow for a traditional welcome over video call with mission managers and family before beginning a safety briefing and familiarization with the space station’s complex systems.

Williams, an Eagle Scout who holds a private pilot’s license, is a standout in an astronaut office with super achievers.

After graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in physics, Williams was conducting radio astronomy research on his way to a Ph.D. And “Down the street from my house, there was a volunteer fire department. And I thought, oh, this sounds like something that could be fun and interesting.”

“So I started volunteering. Trained as an EMT and a firefighter, and started doing it on a sort of volunteer basis. And I found that I really liked it. I found a lot of satisfaction in knowing that… at the end of the shift, I would actually have had a very direct and immediate positive impact on someone’s life.”

He continued this throughout graduate school. Then, when he was finishing his doctorate in astrophysics, Williams said he met a doctor he knew at a party who told him “there is a huge need for physicists in medicine, especially in radiation oncology, where we use radiation to treat cancer.”

He talked to a few other people, including someone who had been an astronomer before going into medical physics, and “I was amazed at how much of what I knew and learned as an astronomer would be really useful and directly applicable to medicine.”

“Much of the mathematics behind (medical) imaging is exactly the same mathematics you use in a radio telescope to produce an image,” Williams said. “It was very rewarding to see that the image processing techniques that I used as (a radio astronomer) actually had direct application in medicine.”

At the time of his selection as an astronaut, Williams was on the staff of Harvard Medical School as a clinical physicist and researcher. He is the second member of the 2021 class of astronauts to fly in space, having been assigned to the Soyuz MS-28 mission immediately after finishing astronaut candidate training.

He said that training for launch on a Russian spacecraft was difficult, primarily because of the travel required. He credited his wife Aubrey for keeping the family life running smoothly.

As for what he expects to happen during his eight-month stay in space, Williams repeated a familiar theme.

“I’ve got a lot of different goals, but I think the biggest goal, and the thing I’m most excited about, is to really be able to put my training into practice and do a really good job of furthering the science and research that we’re doing on the space station.”

“I think it’s incredibly important. I think it’s incredibly interesting and incredibly inspiring, and I feel really fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to it.”