The International Space Station is crowded again

Crew-12 includes astronauts Jessica Meir (NASA), Jack Hathaway (NASA), Sophie Adenot (European Space Agency ESA) and Andrey Fedyaev (Russian Space Agency Roscosmos). The crew flew into space thanks to the Crew Dragon spacecraft and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, taking off at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, Florida (USA) at 5:17 p.m. on February 13 (Hanoi time).

This was the first spaceflight for Hathaway and Adenot, but the second for Meir and Fedyaev. Fedyaev joined the crew at the last minute to replace compatriot Oleg Artemyev, who was accused of violating US national security regulations for taking photos of sensitive SpaceX documents and technology during training.

The Crew-12 team is expected to work on the ISS until the end of October, making their work a little longer than the usual six-month cycle. In fact, they departed earlier than planned to replenish personnel for the ISS station, which has been operating without people since January 15, when the Crew-11 crew returned to Earth.

The Crew-11 crew flew to the ISS on August 1, 2025 and had to return about a month earlier than expected due to a member having health problems. This is the first time in the history of the ISS, which has continuously welcomed rotating crews since November 2000, that a mission was shortened because of the astronaut’s health. NASA has not revealed the astronaut’s identity or provided details about health problems for reasons of personal information security.

Initially, the number of astronauts regularly present on the ISS station was only three. In 2009, this number doubled and by 2020 it continued to increase to 7 people. Currently, in addition to the newly arrived Crew-12 crew, the ISS station also has three astronauts from the Soyuz MS-28 mission including Chris Williams (NASA), Sergey Kud-Sverchkov (Roscosmos), Sergei Mikaev (Roscosmos).

“In summary, over the past few weeks, we have brought the Crew-11 crew back earlier than expected, accelerated the progress of sending the Crew-12 crew to space, and prepared for the Artemis 2 mission,” said Jared Isaacman, NASA Director. In the Artemis 2 mission, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft will take astronauts to space around the Moon and return to Earth after 10 days, expected to deploy in March.

Mike Fincke, NASA astronaut on the Crew-11 mission, commented: “The way we handled everything from start to finish, from normal operations to this unexpected operation, really bodes well for future space exploration missions.”