This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – so much has happened since I posted the last one back in July and not all  of it was good. With the loss of a Dragon freighter at the end of June the third supply flight in a row had not reached the ISS, causing some major concern – but since then both a Progress transporter and a Japanese HTV have arrived without problems and both SpaceX and Orbital/ATK are working hard on returning to flight soon. On a more positive note, the first space-grown vegetable was served on the ISS and there was also a successful spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts. The crisis seems to be mostly over, but in September it is going to get very crowded on the station.   

Who is staying: Scott Kelly and Mikhail Korniyenko have been on the station since March and will be staying until early 2016 as part of their One-Year-Crew mission, while current ISS commander Gennady Padalka will leave this September. Kjell Lindgren, Oleg Kononenko and Kimiya Yui have arrived only recently on July 22nd and will be staying until December. This actually brings the social media involvement on the ISS back to three, because Scott Kelly, Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui are all active Twitter users at @StationCDRKelly, @Astro_Kjell and @Astro_Kimiya, sending beautiful photos from space everyday and more. There’s also the wonderful Expedition 45 film poster in true Star Wars style, something which has been kind of a tradition with the last few ISS crews.

Who is launching: This Wednesday, September 2, a somewhat unusual in-between-mission will be launching to the ISS. Its main purpose is a so-called ‘taxi flight’ to bring up a fresh Soyuz because of the limited on-orbit lifetimes of the spacecraft, but in combination with the one-year-mission a spare third seat on this flight was originally reserved for singer Sarah Brightman, but she surprisingly gave up her seat. She was replaced by Aidyn Aimbetov, the first Kazach astronaut to fly in space and go to the ISS. Joining him will be Danish ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen for a 10-day stay, while Russian cosmonaut Sergey Volkov will stay for about half a year on his third stay on the ISS as the replacement for Gennady Padalka. Both Mogensen and Volkov are active Twitter users at @Astro_Andreas and @Volkov_ISS, so this flight will not only bring the ISS crew up to nine people for a short time, but also the tweeting astronauts to a record-breaking five at once – although Mogensen might not have much time for that during his short IRISS mission. This flight is also important to bring up a fresh Soyuz, because the spacecraft can only remain docked for about 200 days before they have to return to Earth. The astronauts will also be taking the long 2-day-route because the station’s orbit had to be raised recently to avoid getting hit by space debris.

Who is leaving: After ten days in orbit, Andreas Mogensen and Aidyn Aimbetov will leave the ISS again and take Gennady Padalka as Soyuz commander with them, who is completing his half-year stay that had started back in March. They will be flying back to earth in the Soyuz that originally brought up Padalka, Scott Kelly and Mikhail Korniyenko – this is the “oldest” spacecraft of the three which will be docked to the ISS at this point.

The last crew launch of the year will be on December 15th, carrying Yuri Malenchenko from Roscosmos, Timothy Kopra from NASA and Timothy Peake from ESA into orbit.

Cargo Flights to the ISS are currently planned for October 1 with a Progress freighter from Baikonur, which will be followed by another one on November 21. These are the only uncrewed flights to the ISS currently scheduled for the rest of the year because the SpaceX missions are still on hold pending the investigation into the failed launch from late June – although SpaceX has already determined that the cause of the accident was a failed strut in a second stage tank which caused more a disintegration than an explosion. The failed CRS-8 mission will probably be reflown, but when exactly is still unclear – CRS-9 was originally planned for December 9, but it is unlikely that the previous flight will come much sooner than that. Orbital/ATK also seem to have made some progress of working with ULA to launch their Cygnus transporter to the ISS on an Atlas 5 rocket, but no launch date has been announced yet.

Back on Earth, the proposed reorganization of Roscosmos after the recent corruption scandals seems to have gone through now. The ‘new’ Roscosmos has now been merged with the United Rocket and Space Coporation into a new, fully state-owned company headed by former automobile executive Igor Komarov. Russia has also been building a new spaceport, the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in the far east of the country to reduce the dependency on the Baikonur facility in Kazakhstan. First uncrewed flights from the new Angara spaceport were originally announced for late 2015, but there are again reports of widespread corruption and delays with the first crewed flights only expected for 2023, making inagural launches this year very unlikely. The new spaceport is also tied to the development of the Angara Rocket and a new crew launch vehicle, which are both supposed to be launched from Vostochny.