Space to Ground: Changing Space: April 11, 2025

NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.

What is said in the film

Welcome to Space to Ground, I'm Raegan Scharfetter. And I'm Nilufar Ramji. If you were to fly non-stop from Los Angeles to New York it would take 5 hours and 6 minutes. A flight from Oslo, Norway to Athens, Greece 3 hours and 50 minutes. However it took NASA astronaut Jonny Kim less time this week to fly from Earth to the International Space Station.

On March 8th in the early morning hours the Los Angeles native launched to the station' "Engine ignition and liftoff! Liftoff of Soyuz MS-27. Kim, Ryzhikov, and Zubritskiy begin a sprint for a marathon mission on the International Space Station. " Kim, along with his two cosmonaut crewmates, Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexander Zubritskiy, launched aboard the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft at 1:47 a. m Central time on April 8th from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The trio orbited Earth for just over three hours before docking to the Prichal docking module of the orbital outpost, beginning their 8-month research mission. Longer duration spaceflight is on the horizon. But in order for us to be prepared we need to understand what happens to humans in low Earth orbit before making the journey to Mars that can last up to two years. Astronauts are performing research on the space station and sometimes they are the subject of scientific research. Astronauts today typically spend about 6 to 8 months on station, while some NASA astronauts like Frank Rubio have spent over a year.

We have a good amount of data from crew members on these long duration flights and quite a lot from short duration missions like during space shuttle missions where crew members spent just a few weeks in space. The million-dollar question is what happens to the human body over the course of more than a year in space? An integrated protocol called CIPHER is bringing together a huge number of disciplines to investigate the many aspects to a long-duration human mission on the International Space Station, and NASA astronaut Jonny Kim is a CIPHER participant. "It started over a year ago for me, and it examines astronauts leading up to flight. And we test everything from the physiological, the medical, the behavioral, the exercise performance, the cognitive performance.

We measure blood samples, bone densities, and we track that throughout an astronaut's career, not just pre-flight but during flight, and post-flight. We hope to be able to answer a lot of questions that we need before we start committing ourselves to long duration multi-year space flights to Mars and beyond. " With the arrival of Kim and his crew mates it's almost time to say farewell to another crew, which includes NASA astronaut Don Pettit who will have his fair share of celebrating upon his arrival back home. The oldest active NASA astronaut will ring in his 70th birthday during the early morning hours of April 20th after he and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner land in the grassy plains of Kazakhstan following an approximate 4-hour trek from the space station. Aside from his iconic astrophotography of stunning auroras, star trails, and the occasional rocket launch, Pettit also spent his seven-month stay aboard the orbiting laboratory conducting research to enhance on-orbit metal 3D printing capabilities, explore plant growth under varying water conditions, and investigate fire behavior in microgravity.

For every single day since November 2nd 2000, humans have been living aboard the International Space Station. The people that make up these flight crews are just the tip of humanity's operations on the orbiting laboratory. Teams of dedicated people are constantly monitoring consoles here on Earth to ensure the safety of the crews, and the success of their mission. You can hear from some of the flight controllers about what it takes to keep things running smoothly on the space station on the latest edition of "Houston We Have a Podcast. " You can find this along with a galaxy of other NASA podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and at nasa.

gov. And for this week, that's Space to Ground. Thank you so much for watching.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/jcs2025m000065_Space to Ground_565_250411). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.