Don Pettit isn’t your average senior citizen. Instead of enjoying life in the slow lane, he’s getting ready for a rocket ride to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday.
At 69, Pettit is NASA’s oldest active astronaut, and this will be his fourth trip to orbit in a flight career spanning 22 years. He’ll head to space aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Alongside him will be cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner.
Pettit’s first trip to the space station was in 2002 — soon after it became operational — where he served as the NASA Science Officer aboard the station as part of Expedition 6.
The experienced astronaut also traveled to the station aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-126, while his most recent visit to the orbital outpost was in 2011.
Pettit has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Arizona, and during his space adventures he loves to share details of his science experiments aboard the orbital laboratory. With that in mind, we can expect lots of communications from Pettit via his social media feeds during his six-month stint in orbit.
“During his previous missions, Pettit has contributed to advancements for human space exploration aboard the International Space Station resulting in several published scientific papers and breakthroughs,” NASA said.
He’s also an avid photographer and so we can expect to see some dazzling imagery from him snapped aboard the ISS, like this infrared image that he captured during has last mission and which he shared on X (formerly Twitter) just a few days ago:
Camana, Peru region in near infrared. Wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, this lush flora-packed river delta appears as bright magenta. Camana is the grayish feature in the lower center of the river delta. This is in stark contrast to the sparse foliage in… pic.twitter.com/zXu6Gor1MF
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) September 1, 2024
How to watch
NASA will begin a live-stream of the event at 11:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday, September 11, which will include the final preparations for launch and the liftoff itself at 12:23 p.m. ET.
You can watch via the video player embedded at the top of this page, or by heading to NASA’s YouTube channel, which will carry the same feed.