Mission Status Center
Live coverage of the Expedition 42 mission on the International Space Station. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
Live coverage of the Expedition 42 mission on the International Space Station. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
A Russian Proton rocket launched at 0345 GMT Thursday (11:45 p.m. EDT Wednesday) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with the EchoStar 21 communications satellite, a hefty 7.6-ton telecommunications station designed to support a mobile network in Europe. Managed by U.S.-based International Launch Services, the mission will take more than nine hours to deliver EchoStar 21 into a geostationary transfer orbit using five burns of the Breeze M upper stage engine.
In a rapid-fire crew rotation, a NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are packing up for the trip back to Earth Saturday, leaving the International Space Station just eight days after the arrival of another three-person crew and three weeks before their own replacements arrive to boost the lab’s crew back to six.
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