Russia's Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying a three-person crew to the International Space Station, docking just over six hours later. The flight marked a return to orbit for Nick Hague, who had survived a dramatic launch abort the previous October, and began Christina Koch's record-setting extended mission aboard the station.
Five months earlier, Nick Hague had experienced one of the more harrowing moments in recent spaceflight history: a booster failure forced his Soyuz capsule into a ballistic abort just minutes after launch, subjecting him and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to crushing g-forces before a safe landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Returning to the same launch pad took considerable nerve.
On this flight, the same commander, Ovchinin, flew again alongside Hague, this time reaching orbit without incident, and joined by Christina Koch, who was beginning a mission that would stretch to 328 days, at the time the longest single spaceflight ever completed by a woman. Koch's extended stay contributed valuable data on the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body ahead of eventual Mars missions.
The successful docking at the International Space Station also came amid heightened scrutiny of Soyuz reliability after the October abort, and NASA officials publicly praised the Russian space agency Roscosmos for the thoroughness of its investigation and fixes. The mission underscored how thin the margin for error remains in human spaceflight, and how quickly astronauts return to the launch pad after even serious failures.
Key people: Nick Hague, Christina Koch, Alexey Ovchinin