A new crew of astronauts will be heading to the International Space Station in just a few weeks. Crew-9 will travel aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. But ahead of their launch, NASA has revealed the four astronauts who will make up the following crew, Crew-10. They will launch to the ISS next year, around February 2025.
Crew-10 will consist of NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, plus Takuya Onishi of Japanese space agency JAXA and Kirill Peskov of Russian space agency Roscosmos.
McClain will be the commander of the mission, which will be her second mission to the ISS. Previously, she spent 204 days in space and performed two spacewalks, including one to upgrade the batteries as part of the ISS’s power system. McClain had also been slated to be a part of the first all-female spacewalk, but that had to be called off due to spacesuit sizing issues. In the end, the first all-female spacewalk was performed a few months later by NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir.
This will be the first spaceflight for both Ayers and Peskov. Ayers comes from the Air Force, and was a member of NASA’s 2021 astronaut class. She is the first member of this class to be sent to space. Peskov is a former pilot who was selected as a cosmonaut in 2018.
Onishi has been to the ISS once before, when he spent 133 days in space. He has particular experience with Kibo, the Japanese experiment module on the ISS. This research facility is used for experiments in biology, physics, and technology, and has an airlock allowing experiments to be performed in the vacuum of space, as well as in pressurized conditions. Onishi previously constructed a new experimental environment within Kibo during his stay on the station, and afterwards led the team that operated Kibo from JAXA Mission Control in Tsukuba, Japan.
Crew-10 is so named as they will be the 10th group of four astronauts sent to the ISS on board the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle. They will launch using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early next year.
Other astronauts travel to the ISS using Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and the intention was to also have the Boeing Starliner spacecraft available for taking astronauts to the station as well. However, the first crewed test flight of the Starliner has been troubled, due to issues with the spacecraft’s thrusters and helium leaks, and the return leg of the journey has not yet been completed.