Soyuz MS-13, also designated ISS flight 59S, was a crewed

Soyuz Soyuz is a transliteration of the Cyrillic text Союз (Russian language, Russian and Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, 'Union'). It can refer to any union, such as a trade union (''profsoyuz'') or the Soviet Union, Union of Soviet Socialist Republi ...

mission launched on 20 July 2019 – the 50th anniversary of the first

Moon landing A Moon landing or lunar landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon, including both crewed and robotic missions. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was Luna 2 in 1959. In 1969 Apollo 11 was the first cr ...

– carrying three members of the Expedition 60 crew to the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was Assembly of the International Space Station, assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United ...

: a Russian commander, an American flight engineer, and a European flight engineer. Soyuz MS-13 was the 142nd flight of a Soyuz spacecraft. It was at one point the last Soyuz flight contracted by NASA in the expectation that subsequent astronaut transport would be provided by the

Commercial Crew Program The Commercial Crew Program (CCP) provides Private spaceflight, commercially operated human spaceflight, crew transportation service to and from the International Space Station (ISS) under contract to NASA, conducting crew rotations between t ...

, but in early 2019, NASA sought to purchase two additional Soyuz seats to provide greater certainty given delays in that program.

Crew

Backup crew

Relocation

The Soyuz crew relocated the MS-13 spacecraft from the aft port of the ''Zvezda'' module and performed a manual docking on the ''Poisk'' module on 26 August 2019. This cleared the way for Soyuz MS-14 to perform an automatic docking on ''Zvezda'', after a faulty signal amplifier on ''Poisk'' caused MS-14's first docking attempt to abort on 24 August 2019. The last time a Soyuz spacecraft was relocated was in August 2015 during the Soyuz TMA-16M mission.

References

{{Orbital launches in 2019 Crewed Soyuz missions Spacecraft launched in 2019 2019 in Russia Spacecraft launched by Soyuz-FG rockets Spacecraft which reentered in 2020