Today, the number of people in Earth orbit reached a new record, as the Russian Soyuz capsule launched three new crew members towards the International Space Station (ISS). With this latest launch, the total number of people in orbit has reached 19, surpassing the previous record of 17 set last year.
The Soyuz capsule, which launched today, is carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. They are expected to dock with the ISS at around 3:30 p.m. EDT (7:30 p.m. GMT), just three hours after launch.
Once on board, Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner will join the nine people already on the ISS. This group includes NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Tracy Caldwell-Dyson, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams, along with Russian cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko.
Wilmore and Williams were already scheduled to return home. They had taken off in June in Boeing’s Starliner capsule for the Crew Flight Test (CFT), the spacecraft’s first crewed mission. Due to thruster issues, the Starliner remained docked to the ISS for three more months. NASA has decided to return the Starliner to Earth uncrewed, which happened over the weekend. Wilmore and Williams will now return in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in February.
In addition to the ISS crew, there are currently three astronauts on board China’s Tiangong space station: Li Cong, Li Guangsu, and Ye Guangfu, on the Shenzhou 18 mission. Meanwhile, four astronauts are aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon on the Polaris Dawn mission, which launched on Sept. 10. This Crew Dragon, named Resilience, is already farther from Earth than any crewed vehicle since the Apollo era. The Polaris Dawn mission aims to make more history, including a planned private spacewalk by Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, scheduled for early Sept. 12.
The overall record for most people in space is 20, set in May 2023 and matched in January 2024. This record includes six space tourists who briefly joined 14 astronauts in orbit on suborbital flights with Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity. For those considering the Kármán Line (the 62-mile-high limit of space), the record for most people in space is 19, set during Blue Origin’s NS-19 flight on December 11, 2021, and matched today.
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