Anna Kikina’s Crew Dragon flight to the ISS is scheduled for October 3

Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX Crew Dragon rocket as part of the Crew-5 mission on October 3, informed Roskosmos.

“NASA and SpaceX have set a launch date for the Crew-5 mission. The launch is scheduled for October 3 at 19:45 Moscow time, but may be rescheduled to a later date.

The crew then included NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Kassada and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata. Crew Dragon will be launched by a Falcon-9 launch vehicle from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

At the end of July, Roscosmos said that in total, according to the agreement between Russia and the United States on cross-flights, Russian cosmonauts will fly to the ISS three times.

On July 15, Roscosmos announced that it had signed an agreement with NASA on flights of integrated crews on American and Russian spacecraft to the ISS. The essence of the agreement is that in the event of an emergency, which may be associated with the cancellation or delay of the launch of a Russian or American spacecraft, at least one Roscosmos cosmonaut and one NASA cosmonaut will be on board the ISS to service the Russian and American segments of the station.

At the end of July, the head of Roskosmos, Yuri Borisov, announced that Russia would withdraw from the ISS project after 2024 and begin to form its own orbital station. Sergei Krikalev, executive director of the corporation for manned programs, specified that this could happen in 2025, 2028, and 2030. The timing will depend on the technical condition of the station.

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