NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy is scheduled to travel to the International Space Station from Kazakhstan early Thursday morning with two Russian cosmonauts.

Liftoff of the Soyuz rocket is planned for 4:05 a.m. EDT from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome. That will start a six-hour journey, orbiting the Earth four times before catching up to the space station.

The launch is scheduled amid the coronavirus pandemic, with the passengers having undergone a two-week isolation period before departure. They have very little human contact during that period, except for close monitoring of health conditions, according to NASA.

As with most crewed Soyuz launches, very little additional equipment or science will be on board. A SpaceX cargo capsule delivered supplies to the space station March 9.

Cassidy and the cosmonauts -- Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner -- are scheduled to be aboard the space station next month for the planned arrival of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule.

That will be the first U.S. spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station since the shuttle program ended in 2011.

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are to arrive on NASA's SpaceX Demo-2 flight test, currently targeted to launch no earlier than mid-to-late May.

The crew on Thursday will dock with the station's Zvezda service module at 10:16 a.m. EDT. About two hours after docking, hatches between the Soyuz and the station will open.

The new crew will join Expedition 62 Commander Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos and NASA astronauts Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir, who will complete their station mission and return to Earth on April 17 on another Soyuz.

Cassidy is due to become Expedition 63 commander upon the departure of Skripochka, Morgan and Meir. A change of command ceremony is planned Wednesday.

The spaceflight will be the third for Cassidy and Ivanishin and the first for Vagner.

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No press, no family: Space crew set for launch during pandemic
Almaty, Kazakhstan (AFP) April 8, 2020
A three-man space crew finished preparations on Wednesday for a mission to the International Space Station, which is going ahead despite the coronavirus pandemic. Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner of Russia's Roscosmos space agency and NASA's Chris Cassidy will blast off from Kazakhstan for a six-month mission at 08:05 GMT Thursday. But with journalists and relatives unable to travel to Baikonur due to restrictions related to COVID-19, the traditional farewell press conference broadcast by Ros ... read more