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There is currently more activity in Earth’s orbit than ever before.
Three people launched today (September 11) aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station (ISS), bringing the total number of people in Earth orbit to a new high.
“With the trio in orbit, there is a record of 19 people right now,” NASA commentator Anna Schneider said during the agency’s webcast of the Soyuz launch. The previous record was 17, set last year.
The Soyuz launched today carries NASA’s Don Pettit and cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner. The trio is expected to arrive at the ISS around 3:30 p.m. EDT (7:30 p.m. GMT), just three hours after liftoff.
They will join nine people aboard the orbiting laboratory: NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Tracy Caldwell-Dyson, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams, and cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko.
Wilmore and Williams were supposed to be home by now; they launched last June on the Crew Flight Test (CFT), the first crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. The CFT was only supposed to last about 10 days, but Starliner experienced engine problems in orbit, and NASA left the capsule docked to the ISS for three months while it investigated the problem. Ultimately, the agency decided to return Starliner to Earth uncrewed – which happened over the weekend – and bring Williams and Wilmore home in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule next February.
Related: The most extreme records in manned space flights
There are also currently three people living on board the Chinese space station Tiangong – Li Cong, Li Guangsu and Ye Guangfu from the Chinese mission Shenzhou 18 – and four astronauts inhabit a free-flying Crew Dragon.
That quartet – Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon – launched on Tuesday (Sept. 10) for the five-day Polaris Dawn mission. Their Crew Dragon, named Resilience, has already traveled farther from Earth than any manned vehicle since the Apollo era, and Polaris Dawn is about to make even more history: Isaacman and Gillis plan to conduct the first private spacewalk on Thursday (Sept. 12) at around 2:20 a.m. EDT (06:20 GMT).
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The record for most people in space overall is 20. It was set in May 2023 and broken on January 26 of this year. On both occasions, the 14 astronauts in orbit were briefly joined by six space tourists who reached the suborbital region aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceplane.
VSS Unity will reach an altitude of more than 80 kilometers above Earth, which is considered by NASA and the U.S. military to be the beginning of space. However, the vehicle will not reach the 100-kilometer-high Kármán line, which is considered by some other people and organizations to be the boundary of space.
For followers of the Kármán Line, the record for “most people in space” is 19, set during the NS-19 flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft on December 11, 2021—and today tied with the Soyuz launch.
