The seven men and women aboard the ISSpublished at 16:35 BST
Pallab Ghosh
Image source, Anadolu via Getty Images
Crew-12 mission astronauts Jack Hathaway, Andrey Fedyaev, Jessica Meir and Sophie Adenot preparing to launch to the ISS from Florida
The seven crew members currently aboard the International Space Station represent five countries and a remarkable range of backgrounds.
Jessica Meir, 48, commands the Crew-12 mission. Born in Caribou, Maine, to Israeli and Swedish immigrant parents, she holds a doctorate in marine biology and once studied how emperor penguins hold their breath in Antarctica. She made history in 2019 as part of the first all-female spacewalk. She is a mother and a private pilot, and is conversational in both Swedish and Russian.
Jack Hathaway, 44, is Crew-12's pilot and a US Navy Commander from South Windsor, Connecticut. He trained as a test pilot at the Empire Test Pilots' School in the UK before being selected by NASA in 2021.
Sophie Adenot, 43, is a French colonel, helicopter test pilot and the second French woman ever to reach space, inspired as a teenager by watching Claudie Haigneré launch to the Mir space station. She speaks four languages, is a certified yoga teacher and a trained skydiver.
Chris Williams, 42, is a Nasa physicist and former cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital who pivoted from studying the early universe for his MIT doctorate to treating tumours before becoming an astronaut. He also volunteered as a firefighter and EMT.
Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, 42, the station commander, is a rocket engineer born in Baikonur — the very city from which so many space missions have launched. He graduated with honours from Moscow State Technical University and worked as an engineer at RSC Energia before being selected as a cosmonaut in 2010. He was awarded the Hero of the Russian Federation after his first ISS mission in 2020. He has also trained in underground cave systems in Sardinia and studied planetary geology in the Dolomites as part of ESA's astronaut preparation programmes.
Sergei Mikaev, 39, is on his first spaceflight. Born in Irkutsk in Siberia, he rose to Major and commander of a military aviation unit in Primorsky Territory — Russia's remote far east, bordering China — before being selected as a cosmonaut in 2018. He is married with two children.
Andrey Fedyaev, 45, is a Russian cosmonaut and former Air Force major from Serov in the Ural mountains, on his second spaceflight. When he flew on Crew-6 in 2023, he became only the second Russian cosmonaut ever to launch aboard an American commercial spacecraft. He is now on his second mission, again flying alongside Nasa colleagues aboard Dragon.