The fourth human spaceflight — and third orbital human flight — of the year has successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station (ISS). Soyuz MS-25 was scheduled to fly on Thursday, March 21, at 13:21 UTC from Site 31/6 at the spaceport. Mission commander Oleg Novitsky, representing Roscosmos, NASA’s Tracy Caldwell Dyson, and Belarusian Marina Vasilevskaya were on board. An automatic abort command was issued at the T-20 second mark, however. With a 10 minute window for this launch, the next opportunity was on Saturday, March 23 at 12:36 UTC.
Once Soyuz MS-25 got off the ground, it took a 48-hour path to the ISS. If it had launched on Thursday, it was expected to take an “express” path to the Station that will take only three hours and 18 minutes to get to docking, which was expected to occur at 16:39 UTC on the same day.
This path is not available for all launch windows, and was not available for when MS-25 actually did launch. After rendezvousing with the ISS, the Soyuz spacecraft will dock to the Prichal docking module, itself attached to the Nauka science module, on the nadir side of the Station’s Russian segment. Docking is scheduled for Monday, March 25 at 11:09 AM EDT (15:09 UTC).