[Look] NASA ISS Astronauts to Livestream First-Ever Relocation Flight; How, Where, and When to Watch

The crewmembers of the official International Space Station are expected to be taking a brief spin in a particular Soyuz spacecraft, this Thursday, March 19. The purpose of this flight is to relocate it in order to make room for the upcoming arrival of yet another Soyuz some time next month. The exciting part is that people at home can watch the whole event live!

Space flight today

The two Russian cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Ryzhikov, along with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will reportedly be the ones undocking the Soyuz MS17 spacecraft today expected to take place at exactly 12:38 PM EDT. NASA themselves announced this particular dip into space.

The live coverage of the flight will start shortly before the actual flight itself at 12:15 PM EDT and people at home are invited to watch the flight. The people at home can watch everything live at Space.com which is courtesy of NASA TV or even directly through the space agency.

Soyuz space flight

The trio will reportedly climb directly inside the Soyuz and even undock it from the whole Earth-facing port of the station's very own Rassvet module, which is reportedly used for the ship's cargo storage as well as payload operations. After this, they will then fly over it towards the space-facing Poisk port, where the reported crew will redock the said video at 1:07 PM EDT. The whole spaceflight is now estimated to take around 30 minutes.

According to the article by Space.com, this particular Soyuz maneuver is reportedly going to be the first ever relocation flight ever since August 2019 and can be known as the 15th Soyuz redocking effort overall. The newly freed up Rassvet port is expected to accommodate yet another Royuz which is set to launch towards the whole orbiting lab this upcoming April 9.

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NASA ISS

The expected spacecraft will reportedly be carrying the NASA astronaut known as Mark Vande Hei, who now might remain on the space station for an estimated up to a year. Another two cosmonauts are also expected to make it to the ISS through the new Soyuz namely Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitsky.

Ryzhikov, Rubins, and also Kud-Sverchkov are all expected to return to Earth quite shortly after the newcomers are expected to arrive. The three are reportedly expected to depart the orbiting lab this upcoming April 17. They will all travel in their trusty Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft. This was the original spacecraft that had launched them directly towards the space station last October 2020.

What makes this particular space flight different from most of the other space flights is that it is a preparatory flight or basically one of those flights in between. Repositioning the Soyuz is no easy task given they will be flying spacecraft in space and having to reposition it perfectly on another side of the International Space Station.

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Written by Urian Buenconsejo