MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russia's Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said Friday it had approved the main and the substitute crews of the Expedition 45/46 scheduled to be sent to the International Space Station on board the Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft on September 2.
The main crew comprises Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, European Space Agency flight engineer Andreas Mogensen, who will become the first Danish astronaut, and Kazakh cosmonaut Aydin Aimbetov.
Aimbetov got a chance to join the crew after famous British soprano Sara Brightman called off her trip to the ISS as a space tourist.
Last week, a Soyuz spacecraft brought a backup crew of Russia’s Oleg Kononenko, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and NASA’s Kjell Lindgren to the ISS. They joined the main ISS Expedition 44 comprising Russian cosmonauts Commander Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko, and NASA’s Scott Kelly.
The ISS program is a joint project of five space agencies: US NASA, Russia’s Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
