Roscosmos to launch Soyuz MS-29 with crew of three to ISS on July 14—launch time, livestream details

NASA has announced that its astronaut Anil Menon, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, will launch to the International Space Station (ISS) on July 14, 2026, at 10:47 am EDT. The trio will board the Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and the launch will take place with the help of a Russian Soyuz rocket. This mission will be Menon’s first to the ISS and the second for Dubrov and Kikina.

The Soyuz spacecraft will complete two orbits of the Earth over a period of three hours before catching up to the outpost in space. Docking is scheduled for 1:56 pm, with the spacecraft performing its rendezvous with the Prichal module in the Russian segment of the space station autonomously. Once inside the orbital laboratory almost two hours later, the MS-29 crew will join Expedition 74 crew members, including Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams of NASA, ESA's (European Space Agency) French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos' Sergei Mikaev, Andrey Fedyaev, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.

Kud-Sverchkov is the current commander of the ISS, and will be expected to hand over his responsibilities soon to a successor. This is because the Soyuz MS-28 crew of Kud-Sverchkov, Mikaev, and Williams are also scheduled for a return to Earth later this month after almost 8 months in space, with the incoming crew also slated to spend the same amount of time living in space. While the head count at the orbital laboratory will briefly rise to double digits after MS-29's arrival, the departure of MS-28 will mark the start of Expedition 75 onboard the station.

Like Menon, Dubrov, and Kikina, the returning trio of MS-28 will also don the Russian Sokol suits. According to NASA, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev have already been testing a specialized suit that counteracts the space-induced upward shift of bodily fluids. This Lower Body Negative Pressure suit is meant to ease the astronauts back to gravity and offset the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body by drawing blood and fluids away from the head and back down toward the feet.

How to watch the arrival of Soyuz MS-29 to the ISS?

A live stream of the launch activities will begin at 9:45 am EDT on Tuesday, and will be available on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube channel. Coverage will also be shared across NASA social media platforms. To watch the rendezvous and docking activities once MS-29 arrives in the vicinity of the ISS, one can tune in at 1:10 pm. The three new crew members of Expedition 74/75 will enter the outpost at 3:55 pm, with coverage of the same beginning around 25 minutes earlier.

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