NASA

Chris Williams was selected by NASA to join the 2021 Astronaut Candidate Class. He graduated from Stanford University (Palo Alto, California), with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 2005 and earned a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 2012, where his research was in astrophysics. Williams is a board-certified medical physicist, completing his residency training at Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts), before joining the faculty as a clinical physicist and researcher. During his first mission to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Chris Williams will serve as flight engineer and member of Expedition 74. Williams will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft in November, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the trio will spend approximately eight months aboard the orbiting laboratory. Courtesy of NASA.

Soyuz MS-28

Roscosmos launched two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut to the Rassvet module of the International Space Station.

Soyuz is a human-carrying capsule built and operated by Russia, capable of transporting up to three people to the Space Station at a time. It has been upgraded numerous times since its first use in the 1960s for the Soviet lunar program and was the only crewed vehicle for the Station from 2011 to 2020.

Soyuz

Christopher Williams

United States of America

Roscosmos

This astronaut has spent over a month in space.

Space Resident

This astronaut crossed the Kármán Line (100 km), the internationally accepted boundary of space.

Crossed Kármán Line

Russia

Soyuz MS-17

Soyuz MS-17 ferried three international crew members to the Space Station, two Russians and one American. This was the first of two flights to expand the Station's permanent crew size to seven people.

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