Background, Crew, and Events
The expedition consists of Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner, and Aleksandr Gorbunov, and NASA astronauts Barry E. Wilmore, Sunita Williams, Donald Pettit, and Nick Hague.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the station on 6 June 2024 for what was expected to be a brief visit as part of the Boeing Crew Flight Test mission. However, their spacecraft experienced technical issues and returned to Earth uncrewed, and Wilmore and Williams were added to the Expedition 71/72 crew. [2]
Ovchinin, Vagner, and Pettit arrived at the station on 11 September aboard Soyuz MS-26. [3] [4]
Hague and Gorbunov arrived to the station on 29 September aboard SpaceX Crew-9. [5] The handover between Crew-9 and Crew-8 was far longer than normal. Additional time was needed to reconfigure Crew-8's Dragon capsule to remove the temporary seat structures that were added in case Wilmore and Williams needed to evacuate. The departure was further delayed due to poor weather conditions in the splashdown zones surrounding Florida caused by Hurricane Milton and several other storms. [6] The cumulative delays caused Crew-8 to become the longest Dragon mission when it departed on 23 October.
Expedition 72 saw three spacewalks. On 19 December 2024, Ovchinin and Vagner conducted a 7-hour, 17-minute EVA to work on externally mounted science systems. [7] On 16 January 2025, Hague and Williams completed a 6-hour EVA focused on maintenance and upgrades. This was the first full-length EVA by U.S. astronauts in over a year, following a June 2024 incident in which a leak in an EMU cut a spacewalk short. [8] The final EVA took place on 30 January with Williams and Wilmore removing a radio frequency group antenna assembly during a 5-hour, 26-minute spacewalk. During this EVA, Williams set a new record for total spacewalking time by a female astronaut. [9]
Williams handed over command of the space station to Ovchinin on 7 March to prepare for her upcoming departure. [10] SpaceX Crew-10 arrived at the ISS on 16 March transporting NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. [11] This mission featured a shorter than normal handover with Crew-9 of just two days. [12] [13] It was shortened due to a delay in an upcoming supply flight, [14] which necessitated conserving resources like food and a brief window of favorable weather in the Gulf of Mexico for splashdown. [12] Crew-9 departed with Wilmore and Williams on 18 March. [15]
Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, along with NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, are expected to arrive at the station aboard Soyuz MS-27 on 8 April. [16] After a handover period, Expedition 72 will come to a close on 20 April with the departure of Ovchinin, Vagner, and Pettit on Soyuz MS-26. [17] [18]
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