Astronaut Jeffrey Williams prepares to beat Scott Kelly's record for days spent in space

(Image credit: NASA)

published 18 March 2016

NASA is preparing to send three astronauts to the International Space Station on Friday, following the recent return of Scott Kelly to Earth. Alexey Ovchinin, Jeffrey Williams, and Oleg Skripochka will lift off from Kazakhstan around 3:26 a.m. Saturday local time.

Williams is a three-flight veteran and said the Soyuz spacecraft the men will be taking to the Space Station is "quite the ride," according to CBS News. "It's better than an E-ticket ride at Disneyland, I guess you could say. It only takes nine minutes to get to orbit, and in that time, you're going 17,500 miles an hour."

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"We've got a wide variety of science that's ongoing in the space station, and there's no exception during my coming stay," Williams said. "I think what's most interesting to me, because it supports future exploration, is the study of ourselves. We're guinea pigs up there, so we're doing a lot of studies on the human body, trying to understand the impacts of the environment on us so we can develop countermeasures. Those end up in some ways being the more challenging ones, but they're also the more interesting ones personally."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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