First Korean-American astronauts on the ISS in March 2025

SCIENCE: NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, will be the first Korean-American astronaut to fly a long-duration mission. NASA officials announced Wednesday (Aug. 28) that Kim will spend eight months on the International Space Station (ISS) starting in March 2025, as part of the crews of Expeditions 72 and 73. He will fly to space aboard a Russian Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft with Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky; the astronauts’ assignments were announced last week by the Russian space agency Roscosmos via TASS (Russian state media).

“I am incredibly honored to represent our continued commitment to international cooperation and scientific discovery at NASA,” Kim, formerly of X, posted on Twitter on Thursday (Aug. 29). “Teamwork is one of the most important elements of success in a mission-critical environment like space. While most American astronauts go to space aboard American spacecraft these days, Kim will fly on Soyuz, as some other NASA crew members have done in the past for backup and policy reasons. Roscosmos cosmonauts also exchange seats on American spacecraft, with the latest being Alexander Gorbunov, who is assigned to SpaceX Crew-9, launching on September 24. That said, the Crew-9 astronauts on Crew Dragon will need to be reduced from four members to two due to complications with the Boeing Starliner mission.
Crew-9 will need to make room in its capsule to bring home two other ISS-based NASA astronauts. Those astronauts were originally intended to return home on the Starliner capsule that brought them to the station, but a Starliner return with the astronauts this month was deemed an unacceptable risk due to problems with the spacecraft’s thruster system. Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will move to Crew Dragon and occupy two seats for the trip back to Earth in February 2025, while Gorbunov and US Space Force astronaut Nick Hague will fly to space on Crew-9 and return home with the Starliner astronauts.