For the first time since 2002, a Russian cosmonaut flies aboard a US spacecraft

Despite strained US-Russian relations, cosmonaut Anna Kikina is poised to become the first Russian woman in nearly two decades to launch on an American rocket and the first to board a SpaceX Crew Dragon ferry for a flight to the International Space Station flies.

The 38-year-old Kikina, the only woman on active duty in the Russian Cosmonaut Corps, will be joined by Crew 5 commander Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada and Japanese veteran Koichi Wakata from historic Pad 39A at Kennedy Space on Wednesday at 12 p.m. ET center blast .

Forecasters were predicting good weather on the ground, although mission managers were keeping a close eye on strong winds and waves along the spacecraft’s northeast trajectory over the Atlantic, which could cause problems for booster recovery operations and abort scenarios.

Mann, a Marine Corps colonel and F/A-18 carrier pilot, is the first Native American woman assigned to a space flight. Cassada has a PhD in high energy physics and is an accomplished Navy pilot himself. Wakata, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering, is making his fifth spaceflight with a total of 347 days in orbit.

“I’m looking forward to starting tomorrow. Let’s do it!” man tweeted.

Like Mann and Cassada, Kikina is a rookie, but like her US crewmates, she’s trained for years while waiting to fly. They were surprised by a last-minute change from an expected Soyuz flight to Crew Dragon.

“My leaders just appointed me and said do you want to be part of Crew 5?” Kikina told reporters in broken English. “Yes! Why not? But I was so surprised.”

If all goes well, Mann and Cassada will oversee an automated rendezvous and approach the space station for docking at the lab’s forward port around 4:57 p.m. Thursday.

Kjell Lindgren, Commander of Crew 4, Bob Hines, Jessica Watkins and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, the station’s current commander, stand ready to welcome them aboard. They launched last April aboard a Crew Dragon and plan to return to Earth on October 13th.

Also waiting for Mann and her crewmates on the ISS: cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who arrived at the laboratory complex on September 21 aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.

Kikina originally expected to fly aboard a Soyuz. But she was assigned to Crew 5 after NASA and Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space agency, agreed on a new seat-swapping schedule designed to ensure at least one US astronaut and one Russian cosmonaut are on board the station at all times.

So if a medical emergency or other problem forced a US or Russian spacecraft to depart early and take its crew with it, both nations would still have personnel onboard to operate their respective systems.

“With the Soyuz flight and Crew 5 flight, we will begin what we call an integrated crew or exchange flight, when a crew member from the Russian segment will fly in an American vehicle and an American will fly in a Russian vehicle,” said the veteran Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, now a senior Russian space executive, told reporters Monday.

“And this type of exchange will increase the robustness of our program, and we will continue this practice to make our program more reliable.”