Navy SEAL-doctor-astronaut lifts off with cosmonauts on Russian flight to ISS (video)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
A Navy SEAL, medical doctor and NASA astronaut lifted off for an eight-month mission on the International Space Station — and that was just one of the three crewmembers on the trip into Earth orbit.
Jonny Kim of the United States, together with Russia's Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, launched on Tuesday (April 8) as the Soyuz MS-27 crew. Riding atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket, they ascended from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1:47 a.m. EDT (0547 GMT or 10:47 a.m. local time).
"I am so proud and excited," said Kim at the crew's pre-launch press conference on Monday (April 7). "We have come together, against all odds, and worked to [depart] on this journey."
Following a two-orbit rendezvous, Soyuz MS-27 is expected to autonomously dock with the station's Prichal node at about 5:04 a.m. EDT (0904 GMT) on Tuesday.
Related: Baikonur Cosmodrome: Facts about the Russia-run launch complex
Once the hatches are open, Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim will join the Expedition 72 crew, led by cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin as the station's commander, along with flight engineers Kirill Peskov and Ivan Vagner of the Russian space agency Roscosmos; NASA astronauts Nichole Ayers, Anne McClain and Don Pettit; and Takuya Onishi with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim, together with Ayers, McClain, Peskov and Onishi, will then form the Expedition 73 crew with Onishi in command, when Ovchinin, Vagner and Pettit return to Earth April 19 on board Soyuz MS-26.
During their time in space together, Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim will help oversee the arrival and departure of visiting cargo vehicles, assist in the upkeep of the station's systems and take part in hundreds of experiments. They may also go out on spacewalks (extravehicular activities, or EVAs), including two EVAs planned by Russian flight controllers to deploy experiments and U.S.-planned outings to continue the upgrade of the station's solar arrays and service the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a particle physics detector.
"I really hope that I get to contribute to a spacewalk," said Kim while answering media questions live on NASA's streaming service. "I think physically that is one of the harder things that we get to do, and I am very interested in physical and mental challenges."
"It's something that I, as well as a lot of other astronauts, have worked a lot ... to prepare for, and so hopefully I can put that training to use," he said.
That Kim, 41, is attracted to physical and mental challenges speaks to his background as a U.S. Navy SEAL and a medical doctor. This is his first spaceflight since being selected to become a NASA astronaut with the agency's 22nd class of astronauts in 2017.
"I am seen as maybe unique, but I am with an entire class of amazing people with amazing backgrounds. And when I think of my personal background, I just think of myself being in the right place at the right time and having opportunities that anyone else would have grabbed if they were in those same shoes," Kim said in an interview with collectSPACE.com.
Related stories:
— 3 spaceflyers arrive at the ISS aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft
— Former Navy Seal Jonny Kim will be 1st Korean-American astronaut on ISS
— International Space Station: Everything you need to know about the orbital laboratory
Kim is the third SEAL to become an astronaut, and all three will have now served on the International Space Station. William "Bill" Shepherd led the station's first expedition crew in 2000, and Chris Cassidy's second of two long-duration stays concluded just before the orbiting outpost marked 20 years of continuous human occupancy. Kim will be in space for the start of the 25th year on Nov. 2, 2025.
"John F. Kennedy, who was responsible for initiating our race to the moon, is also the same president who commissioned the United States Navy Seals in 1962. It means a lot to me to be a part of that," said Kim. "I certainly hope to follow in the tradition that Bill started and Chris continued."
Related: Photos: John F. Kennedy's NASA legacy
Ryzhikov, 50, is returning for a third stay on the ISS. A pilot in the Russian Air Force, he became a cosmonaut in 2006 and then was part of the expedition 49/50 and 63/64 station crews. He began this flight having already logged 358 days off the planet.
Zubritsky, 32, is on his first space mission. Selected to train as a cosmonaut in 2018, he will be the sixth cosmonaut to serve as a "special correspondent" for the Russian state-run news agency TASS during his time in Earth orbit.
The Soyuz MS-27 crew, led by commander Ryzhikov, is flying under the call sign "Favor." Their zero-gravity indicator was a small angel holding a horn, and their crew insignia includes two nods to spaceflight anniversaries: 60 years since the world's first spacewalk in March 1965, and 50 years since the first joint mission between the U.S. and Russia, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, in July 1975.
"Soyuz is a Russian word for 'union.' It's also the name of their space vehicle, and I think it's the perfect word to describe the collaboration that we've had between our two countries for many, many decades, and certainly for the entire existence of the space station," said Kim in a media interview. "At the end of the day, we are all humans doing our parts, trying to make this world a better place."
Soyuz MS-27 is Russia's 73rd spacecraft in its class to launch for the station since 2000 and the 156th Soyuz to fly since 1967.
Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on X at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2025 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
32 minutes ago
- CBS News
Tiny fragment of asteroid giving Field Museum scientists a glimpse 4.6 billion years into the past
The Field Museum is the new temporary home to a tiny piece of pristine asteroid. The fragment of the asteroid Bennu, on loan from NASA, won't be on display for visitors, but will give scientists the chance to study an asteroid sample uncontaminated by Earth's atmosphere. A tiny, black fragment might not seem exciting, until a scientist explains it's a specimen from space. "It's an honor of a lifetime to be able to study this sample," said Field Museum curator Dr. Philipp Heck. How did Heck feel when the little rock first arrived at the museum and he held the vial containing the sample? "It was amazing. I was looking forward to that moment for a long time," he said. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission was planned decades ago. In 2016, a spacecraft launched. In 2018, it arrived at Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid as wide as the Sears Tower is tall. The mission collected pieces of the asteroid and brought them back to Earth in 2023. "This is the first U.S. mission that sends a spacecraft to the asteroid and brings a sample back to Earth," said University of Chicago graduate student Yuke Zheng, who is part of the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis team. "It's a tiny, dark, black fragment that is fragile, so we want to protect it very carefully." She'll use the museum's scanning electron microscope to get an up-close look at a tiny sample of Bennu. "What struck me is how dark the sample is. I had never seen such a dark sample," Heck said. The fragment is like a time capsule, taking scientists back 4.6 billion years. "We believe Bennu contains part of the ingredients for life, and part of the ingredients of the formation of Earth," Heck said. Suddenly, a fragment at the bottom of a vial can have you pondering your place in the universe. "I've never studied a pristine sample from an asteroid," Heck said.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Solar Orbiter Captures the First-Ever Images of the Sun's South Pole
We Earthlings see the sun every day of our lives—but gaining a truly new view of our star is a rare and precious thing. So count your lucky stars: for the first time in history, scientists have photographed one of the sun's elusive poles. The images come courtesy of a spacecraft called Solar Orbiter. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020 and has been monitoring our home star since November 2021. But the mission is only now beginning its most intriguing work: studying the poles of the sun. From Earth and spacecraft alike, our view of the sun has been biased. 'We've had a good view of centermost part of the sun's disk,' says Daniel Müller, a heliophysicist and project scientist for the mission. 'But the poles are effectively not visible because we always see them almost exactly edge-on.' [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] We began getting a better perspective earlier this year, when Solar Orbiter zipped past Venus in a carefully choreographed move that pulled the probe out of the solar system's ecliptic, the plane that broadly passes through the planets' orbits and the sun's equator. (The new views show the sun's south pole and were captured in March. The spacecraft flew over the north pole in late April, Müller says, but Solar Orbiter is still in the process of beaming that data back to Earth.) Leaving the ecliptic is a costly, fuel-expensive maneuver for spacecraft, but it's where Solar Orbiter excels: By the end of the mission, the spacecraft's orbit will be tilted 33 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. That tilted orbit is what allows Solar Orbiter to garner unprecedented views of the sun's poles. For scientists, the new view is priceless because these poles aren't just geographic poles; they're also magnetic poles—of sorts. The sun is a massive swirl of plasma that produces then erases a magnetic field. This is what drives the 11-year solar activity cycle. At solar minimum, the lowest-activity part of the cycle, the sun's magnetic field is what scientists call a dipole: it looks like a giant bar magnet, with a strong pole at each end. But as the sun spins, the roiling plasma generates sunspots, dark, relatively cool patches on the sun's surface that are looping tangles of magnetic field lines. As sunspots arise and pass away, these tangles unfurl, and some of the leftover magnetic charge migrates to the nearest pole, where it offsets the polarity of the existing magnetic field. The result is a bizarre transitional state, with the sun's poles covered in a patchwork of localized 'north' and 'south' magnetic polarities. In the solar maximum phase (which the sun is presently in), the magnetic field at each pole effectively disappears. (It can be a bumpy process—sometimes one pole loses its charge before the other, for example.) Then, as years pass and solar activity gradually declines, the continuing process of sunspots developing and dissipating creates a new magnetic field of the opposite charge at each pole until, eventually, the sun reaches its calm dipole state again. These aren't matters of academic curiosity; the sun's activity affects our daily lives. Solar outbursts such as radiation flares and coronal mass ejections of charged plasma can travel across the inner solar system to reach our neighborhood, and they're channeled out of the sun by our star's ever changing magnetic fields. On Earth these outbursts can disrupt power grids and radio systems; in orbit they can interfere with communications and navigations satellites and potentially harm astronauts. So scientists want to be able to predict this so-called space weather, just as they do terrestrial weather. But to do that, they need to better understand how the sun works—which is difficult to do with hardly a glimpse of the magnetic activity at and around our star's poles. That's where Solar Orbiter comes in. Most of the spacecraft's observations won't reach Earth until this autumn. But ESA has released initial looks from three different instruments onboard Solar Orbiter, each of which lets scientists glimpse different phenomena. For example, the image above maps the magnetic field at the sun's surface. And from this view, Müller says, it's clear that the sun is at the maximum period of its activity cycle. Heliophysical models predict 'a tangled mess of all these different patches of north and south polarity all over the place,' he says. 'And that's exactly what we see.' As their accordance with theoretical models suggests, the solar poles aren't entirely mysterious realms. That's in part because while Solar Orbiter is the first to beam back polar images, it isn't the first spacecraft to fly over these regions. That title belongs to Ulysses, a joint NASA-ESA mission that launched in 1990 and operated until 2009. Ulysses carried a host of instruments designed to study radiation particles, magnetic fields, and more. And it used them to make many intriguing discoveries about our star and its curious poles. But it carried no cameras, so despite all its insights, Ulysses left those regions as sights unseen. Fortunately, heliophysics has grown a lot since those days—and space agencies have learned that, in the public eye, a picture can be worth much more than 1,000 words. The result: Solar Orbiter can finally put the spotlight on the sun's poles.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
South pole of the Sun pictured for the first time
The south pole of the Sun has been seen for the first time, in images sent by the British-built spacecraft Solar Orbiter. Usually it is impossible to see underneath the Sun because Earth and all other spacecraft orbit within a flat disc around its equator. For the first time, Solar Orbiter has moved into a tilted orbit of 17 degrees below the equator, giving a new view of our star. 'Today we reveal humankind's first-ever views of the Sun's pole,' said Prof Carole Mundell, director of science at the European Space Agency (ESA). 'The Sun is our nearest star, giver of life and potential disruptor of modern space and ground power systems, so it is imperative that we understand how it works and learn to predict its behaviour. 'These new unique views from our Solar Orbiter mission are the beginning of a new era of solar science.' Solar Orbiter, which is a joint venture between the ESA and Nasa, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2020, taking two years to reach the Sun. Constructed by Airbus in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and carrying several British instruments, the probe was designed to give unprecedented images of the Sun, helping predict dangerous solar flares in time for counter measures to be implemented, such as grounding planes or backing up power plants. Although extreme solar storms are rare, smaller flares have caused widespread disruption in recent times, with a geomagnetic storm leaving six million Canadians without power in 1989. A recent analysis shows that 'severe' magnetic storms occurred in 42 out of the last 150 years, and 'great' super-storms occur six times in every 150 years. The government is so concerned about space weather that it is now listed on its National Risk Register. Over the coming years, the spacecraft will tilt its orbit even further, so the best views are yet to come. 'This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven',' said Daniel Müller, ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist. 'In the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the Sun's polar regions. 'These data will transform our understanding of the Sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity.' Scientists are hoping to learn how material moves in the Sun's outer layers and why the star's magnetic field flips every 11 years. One of the first scientific findings from Solar Orbiter's polar observations is the discovery that at the south pole, the Sun's magnetic field is currently a mess. While a normal magnet has a clear north and south pole, magnetic field measurements show that both north and south polarity magnetic fields are present at the Sun's south pole during the solar maximum. We are currently experiencing a solar maximum and, in five to six years, magnetic activity is expected to become more orderly. 'How exactly this build-up occurs is still not fully understood, so Solar Orbiter has reached high latitudes at just the right time to follow the whole process from its unique and advantageous perspective,' added Prof Sami Solanki, who leads the PHI instrument team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. 'We didn't know what exactly to expect from these first observations – the Sun's poles are literally terra incognita.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
