Soyuz rocket launches US-Russian crew to International Space Station with Thanksgiving Day liftoff (video)

Holiday travel reached new heights today (Nov. 27), as an American astronaut left home for Thanksgiving dinner — in Earth orbit.

Chris Williams of NASA, together with his Soyuz MS-28 crewmates Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, both cosmonauts with Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos, lifted off for the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, beginning a planned eight-month expedition with a coincidental but well-timed celebration.

“The kid who played basketball in the driveway with his cousins before Thanksgiving dinner is now a flight engineer on the three-man crew for Expedition 74,” wrote Juan Williams, a civil rights historian and Chris’ uncle, in a recent column for The Hill newspaper. “Chris’s incredible trip to space is rooted in incredible family trips. His grandmother took a voyage to a new world in 1958. She traveled with three children on a freighter boat carrying bananas from Panama to Brooklyn, New York.”

“This Thanksgiving, I am grateful to live in a country where the grandson of Panamanian immigrants can represent America in the heavens, on a mission of peace and science,” wrote the elder Williams.

Despite the more exotic destination, Chris Williams’ trip to the space station will take far less time than his family’s sea voyage, and may still be shorter than some of the interstate road trips expected across the country today. Having lifted off at 4:27 a.m. EST (0927 GMT or 2:27 p.m. local time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, he, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev are scheduled to dock to the Rassvet module about three hours later.

Flying under the call sign “Gyrfalcon” — a bird of prey also depicted on their mission patch — the Soyuz MS-28 crew took to the skies atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket decorated with the colorful drawings of pediatric cancer patients and the portraits of the first astronaut and cosmonauts to live aboard the ISS 25 years ago.

When they reached orbit, two small crocheted dolls signaled they were now in the weightless environment of outer space. Their zero-g indicators were a ginger cat named “Gizmo” that was gifted by one of the cosmonaut’s families and a knitted cosmonaut made by students attending school in Gagarin, Russia (their town named after the first human in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin).

Awaiting their arrival at the space station are the seven members of Expedition 73. Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineers Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos; Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke of NASA and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui will greet Kud-Sverchkov, Mikaev and Williams after the hatches are opened at about 10:10 a.m. EST (1510 GMT) and “sit down” for a feast.

“This is my second Thanksgiving in space, so I highly recommend it,” said Fincke in a recorded video released by NASA ahead of the holiday. “This time it is going to be with a new Soyuz crew and we’re getting food ready, so we have the traditions like turkey [and] there is some cranberry sauce here.”

The food lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston prepared a special “Holiday Bulk Overwrapped Bag” (BOB) that arrived with a cargo delivery in September.

“We have got everything here from turkey and the traditional things that Mike mentioned, some mashed potatoes, to crab meat, salmon and we even have some lobster, which is amazing!” said Cardman.

After the holiday and the return to Earth by Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim aboard Soyuz MS-27 in early December, Kud-Sverchkov, Mikaev and Williams, together with Cardman, Fincke, Yui and Platonov will form the new Expedition 74 crew. During their planned stay, the Soyuz MS-28 trio will help carry out hundreds of science experiments and technology demonstrations, as well as conduct possible spacewalks and perform station maintenance as needed.

Williams will help install and test the European Enhanced Exploration Exercise Device (E4D), a modular workout system for long-duration missions that combines bicycling, rowing and resistive capabilities together with rope pulling and climbing. He will also conduct studies to improve cryogenic fuel efficiency and grow semiconductor crystals, as well as assist NASA in developing revised re-entry safety protocols to protect crew members during future missions.

Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev will be the first cosmonauts to be aided by GigaChat, an artificial intelligence (AI) bot that through both voice and tablet inputs will help make decisions about the operation of the Russian segment of the space station.

Soyuz MS-28 is the first spaceflight for Williams and Mikaev and the second for Kud-Sverchkov, who logged 185 days in space as a flight engineer on the station’s Expedition 63/64 crew in 2021. Kud-Sverchkov, 42, worked as a rocket engineer for RSC Energia before being selected as a cosmonaut in 2010.

Mikaev, 39, was flying as a military pilot in the Russian Air Force when he was recruited for spaceflight training in 2018. Williams, 42, has a doctorate in physics, studied supernovae using the Very Large Array radio telescope and completed residency training at Harvard that later led to him developing new image guidance techniques for cancer treatment. He joined NASA in 2021 and is the second member of his class (“The Flies”) to fly into space.

Although they are not the first crew to celebrate Thanksgiving in space, the Soyuz MS-28 trio are the first to launch on the holiday day.