BAIKONUR (Sputnik) — The vehicle with Russian cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka and NASA’s Jeff Williams will blast off at 21:26 GMT (00:26 a.m. Moscow time) from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop the Soyuz-FG carrier rocket.
The Soyuz TMA-20M is the last in the Soyuz TMA-M series of space vehicles. Future launches are set to be carried out on the Soyuz MS series, with the current launch initially planned for the Soyuz MS-01 vehicle.
The trio will join Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and Britain’s Tim Peake, who have had the ISS all to themselves since March 1. The new crewmembers are expected to stay at the space station for 173 days.
