American astronomer-turned-medical physicist and now NASA astronaut Chris Williams joined two Russian cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz ferry ship Thursday for a Thanksgiving Day flight to the International Space Station.With commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov at the controls of the Soyuz MS-28/74S spacecraft, flanked on his left by flight engineer Sergey Mikaev and on the right by Williams, the crew’s Soyuz 2.1a booster roared to life at 4:27 a.m. Eastern and smoothly climbed away from the Russian-leased 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 unfolded and the crew set off in pursuit of the space station. If all goes well, the automated two-orbit rendezvous will end with a docking at the lab’s Earth-facing Rassvet module at 7:38 a.m. Eastern.A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut on a flight to the International Space Station. / Credit: Roscosmos/NASAWilliams, a former volunteer fire fighter and emergency medical technician who went on to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT, was a board-certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School when he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHe and flight engineer Mikaev were making their first space flight on Thursday, while Kud-Sverchkov is a seasoned veteran who logged 185 days aboard the space station in 2020-2021. / Credit: Roscosmos/NASA”It’s a really great crew,” Williams said in a NASA interview. “Sergey and Sergey are both just absolutely wonderful people, really kind, super interested, super intellectually curious, which is really fun. Had a lot of really, really great discussions, just talking and talking about things.”It’s been been wonderful to both spend some time with them over in Star City, and also to be able to spend some time with them in Houston through our training.”The Soyuz MS-28/74S crew. Left to right: NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and flight engineer Sergey …
