"New record! 19 people are orbiting Earth right now"

New record! 19 people are orbiting Earth right now​

News
By Mike Wall
published 11 September 2024
The old mark was 17.

https://www.space.com/new-record-19-people-orbiting-earth-soyuz-iss

The Soyuz that launched today is carrying NASA's Don Pettit and cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. The trio is expected to arrive at the ISS around 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT), just three hours after launch.

They'll join nine people aboard the orbiting lab: NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Tracy Caldwell-Dyson, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams, and cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko.
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There are also three people living aboard China's Tiangong space station at the moment — Li Cong, Li Guangsu and Ye Guangfu of the nation's Shenzhou 18 mission — and four astronauts inhabiting a free-flying Crew Dragon.

That quartet — Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon —launched Tuesday (Sept. 10) on the five-day Polaris Dawn mission. Their Crew Dragon, named Resilience, has already gotten farther from Earth than any crewed vehicle since the Apollo era, and Polaris Dawn aims to make more history soon: Isaacman and Gillis plan to conduct the first-ever private spacewalk at around 2:20 a.m. EDT (0620 GMT) on Thursday (Sept. 12).

The record for most people in space overall is 20, set in May 2023 and then tied on Jan. 26 of this year. On both occasions, 14 orbiting spaceflyers were joined briefly in the final frontier by six space tourists who reached the suborbital realm aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity space plane.

VSS Unity gets more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth, which NASA and the U.S. military regard as the beginning of outer space. But the vehicle doesn't reach the 62-mile-high (100 km) Kármán line, which some other people and organizations recognize as space's boundary.

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