Soyuz MS-28: US-Russian Crew Launches To The Space Station

A Soyuz-2.1a rocket launched the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 0927 UTC(Nov. 27), carrying three crew members—NASA astronaut Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev—to the International Space Station (ISS).

The spacecraft docked with the ISS's Rassvet nadir port at 1234 UTC, completing a rapid three-hour rendezvous, with hatch opening at 1516 UTC.

The MS-28 crew were welcomed aboard the ISS as Expedition 73/74 members, by the existing 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 greeted Kud-Sverchkov, Mikaev and Williams after the hatches opened followed by a "sit down" for a feast.

Williams will be eating his Thanksgiving Day dinner in Earth orbit. Although they are not the first crew to celebrate Thanksgiving in space, the Soyuz MS-28 trio are the first to launch and dock on the holiday day in the United States.

"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.

"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.

Williams, 42, a NASA astronaut and physicist, is on his first spaceflight, Kud-Sverchkov, who logged 185 days in space as a flight engineer on the station's Expedition 63/64 crew in 2021, is on his second spaceflight, while Mikayev is making his first journey to space. The crew, flying under the call sign "Gyrfalcon," will spend approximately 240 days aboard the ISS, with a planned return to Earth on July 26, 2026, landing in the Kazakh Steppe.

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 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.

The Soyuz MS-28 mission(or ISS 74S) operated by Roscosmos marks the first crewed flight of the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft, which was reassigned after its originally scheduled vehicle, MS-28 No. 759, sustained damage to its heat shield during testing.

The Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicle and payload fairing arrived at Baikonur by rail on October 22, 2025, and final preparations, including system checks and tests, were completed in early November.