ISS crew to grow to 9 members in Sept
STAR CITY. Feb 21 (Interfax) - The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) will grow to nine members in September 2019, cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin said at a press conference on Thursday.
"We will have nine people on board by the end of September; I have never had experienced that before. When three crews are here it could get a bit tighter, but, the more the merrier. It's nice to see new faces," Ovchinin said.
Ovchinin and NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch will go to the ISS from Baikonur on March 14. They will join the current crew of Oleg Kononenko of Russia, David Saint-Jacques of Canada, and Anna McClain of the United States, who will return to Earth in late June. The Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft manned by Alexander Skvortsov of Russia, Luca Parmitano of Italy, and Andrew Morgan of the United States will arrive in July. Another three-member crew comprising representatives of Russia and the United States and the first astronaut from the United Arab Emirates will join the others in late September.