NASA astronaut joins Russian cosmonauts on Thanksgiving trip to the International Space Station

American astronomer-turned-medical-physicist-turned-NASA astronaut Chris Williams joined two Russian cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz ferry on Thursday for a Thanksgiving flight to the International Space Station.

With Commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov at the controls of the Soyuz MS-28/74S spacecraft, flanked on his left by flight engineer Sergey Mikaev and on his right by Williams, the crew’s Soyuz 2.1a booster roared to life at 4:27 a.m. ET and gently pulled away from the Russian-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Nine minutes and 45 seconds later, the Soyuz spacecraft emerged from the upper booster stage, its two solar wings deployed, and the crew set off in search of the space station. Three hours later, they reached the orbital outpost and headed to dock with the laboratory’s Earth-facing Rassvet module at 7:34 a.m. Eastern Time.

Williams, a former volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician who earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT, was a certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School when he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021.

He and flight engineer Mikaev were making their first space flight on Thursday, while Kud-Sverchkov is a veteran who spent 185 days aboard the space station in 2020-2021.

“It’s a really cool crew,” Williams said in an interview with NASA. “Sergey and Sergey are absolutely wonderful people, very kind, super interested, super intellectually curious, which is really fun. I had a lot of really great discussions, just talking and talking about things.

“It’s been great to spend some time with them in Star City and also be able to spend some time with them in Houston during our training.”

The Soyuz MS-28 crew replaces Soyuz MS-27/73S commander Sergey Ryzhikov, flight engineer Alexey Zubritsky and NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, who were launched to the space station last April. They plan to return to Earth on December 9 to conclude their eight-month stay on the ISS.

Also on hand to welcome Williams and his crewmates aboard the station were NASA Crew 11 Commander Zena Cardman, Michael Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. They launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last August and plan to return home in February or March, after their replacements, Crew 12, arrive.

The 11 station travelers planned to gather for a traditional welcome-aboard video call to mission managers and their families in Moscow before a safety briefing and the start of familiarization with the space station’s complex systems.

Williams, an Eagle Scout with a private pilot’s license, stands out among the high achievers.

After graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in physics, he was conducting research in radio astronomy en route to earning a Ph.D. and “down the street from my house, there was a volunteer fire department. And I thought, oh, that sounds like something that could be fun and interesting to do.”

“So I started volunteering. I trained as a paramedic and a firefighter, and I started doing it on a volunteer basis. And I found that I really liked it. I felt very satisfied knowing that… at the end of the shift, I really would have had a very direct and immediate positive impact on someone’s life.”

It continued like this throughout graduate school. Then, while he was finishing his doctorate in astrophysics, Williams said he ran into a doctor he knew at a party who told him there was “a huge need for physicists in medicine, particularly in radiation oncology, where we use radiation to treat cancer.”

He spoke to a few other people, including one who had been an astronomer before moving into medical physics, and “I was surprised to learn how much of what I knew and had learned as an astronomer would be really useful and apply very directly to medicine.”

“A lot of the math behind (medical) imaging is exactly the same as what is used in a radio telescope to generate an image,” Williams said. “It was quite interesting to see that the image processing techniques I had used as a (radio astronomer) actually carried over quite directly to medicine.”

At the time of his selection as an astronaut, Williams was on the staff of Harvard Medical School as a clinical physicist and researcher. He is the second member of the 2021 astronaut class to fly in space and was assigned to the Soyuz MS-28 mission shortly after completing astronaut candidate training.

He said training for launching a Russian spacecraft was difficult, mainly because of the travel required. He credited his wife, Aubrey, for keeping the family’s life in balance at all times.

As for what to expect during his eight-month stay in space, Williams repeated a familiar theme.

“I have a lot of different goals, but I think the most important one, and what I’m most excited about, is to be able to really put my training into practice and do really good work to advance the science and research that we’re doing on the space station.”

“I think it’s incredibly important. I think it’s incredibly interesting and incredibly inspiring, and I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to that.”