"We are all super excited about the entire mission," Rubio said in his podcast from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City. "We spent a ton of time training for space walks ... [A] biofabrication experiment will be up there, which again, the possibilities that that represents, possibly being able to produce human organs, which would just be phenomenal in our capability to deal with human disease back here on earth."
Rubio, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, is scheduled to launch to the ISS on September 21 on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He will be a flight engineer and a member of the ISS Expedition 68 station crew.
"We all get along great. Sergey is a former Russian air force pilot. Dmitri is an engineer. We get to hang out a lot. When you do that you discover all the commonalities [you share]," Rubio said.
Rubio said high points of his demanding training program included intense weightlessness working on Russian centrifuges and water survival training in case of an emergency landing in the ocean when returning to earth.