PRE-LAUNCH INTERVIEWS WITH NASA ASTRONAUT DON PETTIT, Aug 16, 2024, virtual, 10:00 am ET

NASA astronaut Don Pettit will be available for media interviews on August 16, 2024 at 10:00 am ET. The event will air on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.

Pettit will launch to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Soyuz MS-26 on September 11, 2024 along with Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. They will return on April 1, 2025 after 202 days in space.

This will be Pettit’s fourth visit to the ISS, three of which were multi-month “expedition” missions. The other was a 16-day visit aboard the space shuttle. Selected as an astronaut in September 1996, Pettit has logged 370 days in space and conducted two spacewalks.

At 69, he is NASA’s oldest active astronaut. He’ll become the second oldest person to make a spaceflight after John Glenn, who made his second spaceflight as a Senator in 1998 at the age of 77. (Glenn’s first spaceflight was in 1962 when he became the first American to orbit the Earth.)