A NASA Astronaut joins Russian cosmonauts for a Thanksgiving Day ride to the International Space Station

American Astronomer-turned-medical physicist and now NASA Astronaut Chris Williams joined two Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz shuttle on Thursday’s Thanksgiving Day flight.

With Commander Sergey Kud-sverchkov in control of the soyuz ms-28 / 74s spacecraft, he was fired on the left by Williams Sergey Mikaev and on the left by traveling through the Bailden Cosmodrome in Russia within Kazakhstan.

Nine minutes and 45 seconds later, the Soyuz spacecraft was ejected from the upper stage of the Booster, its two solar wings were made and the team began to pursue the space station. If all goes well, the two automatic reltezvous will end with the rassvet docking module towards Rassvet at 7:38 am.

Williams, a former volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician who went on to earn a ph.d. In Astrophysics from MIT, it was a certified medical femicicist at Harvard Medical School where he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021.

Flight Engineer Mikaev was making his first space flight on Thursday, and Kud-Sverchkov is a veteran below entering 185 days in the space station in 2020-2021.

“It’s a really good worker,” Williams said in a NASA interview. “Sergey and Sergey are just amazing people, very kind, very interesting, intellectually curious, which is really fun.

“It’s been amazing for them both to spend some time with them in Star City, and also to be able to spend time with them in Houston through our training.”

The Soyuz Ms-28 Crew took the Soyuz ms-27 / 73s Commander Sergey Ryzhikov, engineer Alexey Zubritsky and Nasa Astronaut Jonny Kim, who were launched into the space station last April. They plan to return to Earth on December 9 to wrap up their eight-month stay on the ISS.

And there he welcomed Williams and his station crew: NASA Crew 11 Commander Zena Cardman, Michael Fincke, Japanese Astronaut Kimiya Yui and Cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. They launched the avop avop of the spacex falcon 9 Rocket last August and plan to come home in February or March, after their recovery – Crew 12 – Arrive.

All the channel’s 11 salesmen planned to gather for the traditional VIP Aboard Video call to the managers and family back in Moscow before getting used to the green fields of the station.

Williams, an Eagle Scout with a private pilot’s license, is a stomatout among the most successful.

After graduating from Stanford University with a Bachelor’s degree in physics, he did radio astronomy research on his way to a Ph.D. and, “Down the street from my house, there was the Volunteer Fire Department.

“So I started volunteering. He’s trained as an EMT and a firefighter, and I just started doing that with passion.” Towards finding the most positive impact on life. “

He kept that up until graduate school. When he fired his doctor in Astrophysics, Williams said he ran into a doctor he knew at the event who told him there was “a huge need for Oncology, where we use radiation to treat cancer.”

He talked to a few other people, including one who had been an astrophysicist before he switched to medical physics, and “I was struck by how much I could become and learn in terms of astrology that it would actually be useful and work directly into medicine.”

“A lot of the math behind (medicine) is the same kind of math that you use in a radio sample to make an image,” Williams said. “It was kind of neat to see that the image processing techniques that I would use as an (astronomer astronomer) were actually carried over directly into the tree.”

At the time of his selection as an astronaut, Williams was on the team at Harvard Medical School as a mineral physicist and researcher. He is the second Member of the 2021 class of Astronauts to fly in space, assigned to the Soyuz Ms-28 Mission shortly after completing Astronaut candidate training.

He said training for the launch of the Russian spacecraft was difficult, primarily because of the travel required. He credits his wife, Aubrey, with keeping family life intact throughout.

As for what he looks forward to during his eight months in space, Williams reiterated a common theme.

“I have many different goals, but I think the most important thing, and the thing I’m most happy about, is to be able to train my training and do a great job to push forward to the space station.”

“I think it’s very important. I think it’s very interesting and incredibly inspiring, and I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to prove that.”