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Local Hero Chris Williams Takes Thanksgiving Flight to International Space Station
Our very own Chris Williams, a NASA astronaut with a fascinating journey from astronomer to medical physicist, embarked on a Thanksgiving Day flight to the International Space Station (ISS) alongside two Russian cosmonauts. The trio launched aboard a Soyuz ferry ship from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, soaring into the heavens at 4:27 a.m. Eastern time.
Commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov expertly piloted the Soyuz MS-28/74S spacecraft, with flight engineer Sergey Mikaev by his left and Williams to his right. Just nine minutes and 45 seconds after a powerful lift-off, the Soyuz detached from its booster, unfurled its solar wings, and began its pursuit of the orbital outpost.
A mere three hours later, the crew successfully docked with the ISS’s Earth-facing Rassvet module at 7:34 a.m. Eastern.
Williams, a former volunteer firefighter and EMT who earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT, was a board-certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School when he joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021. This marks his inaugural space flight, as it does for flight engineer Mikaev. Commander Kud-Sverchkov, however, is a seasoned veteran, having spent 185 days on the space station in 2020-2021.
“It’s a really great crew,” Williams shared in a NASA interview. “Sergey and Sergey are both just absolutely wonderful people, really kind, super interested, super intellectually curious, which is really fun.
Had a lot of really, really great discussions, just talking and talking about things.” He added, “It’s been wonderful to both spend some time with them over in Star City, and also to be able to spend some time with them in Houston through our training.”
The Soyuz MS-28 crew is taking over from Soyuz MS-27/73S commander Sergey Ryzhikov, flight engineer Alexey Zubritsky, and NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, who arrived at the station last April and are scheduled to return to Earth on December 9th, concluding their eight-month mission.
Williams and his crewmates received a warm welcome from the current ISS inhabitants: NASA Crew 11 commander Zena Cardman, Michael Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. This diverse group launched last August via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and anticipate their return in February or March, once their replacements, Crew 12, arrive. All eleven station residents gathered for a traditional welcome aboard video call with mission managers and families in Moscow, followed by a safety briefing and familiarization with the station’s intricate systems.
Williams, an Eagle Scout with a private pilot’s license, truly embodies the spirit of a super achiever. After graduating from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in physics, he was immersed in radio astronomy research.
He recounted finding a volunteer fire department “down the street from my house. And I was like, oh, that sounds like something that could be kind of like fun and interesting to do.”
He continued, “So I started volunteering. Got trained as an EMT and a firefighter, and started just sort of doing that on a volunteer basis.
And I found that I really liked it. I got a lot of satisfaction out of knowing that… at the end of the shift, I would have really made a very direct and immediate positive impact on somebody’s life.”
He maintained this commitment throughout his graduate studies. As he neared the completion of his astrophysics doctorate, Williams met a doctor at a party who informed him of “a big need for physicists in medicine, in particular, in radiation oncology, where we use radiation to treat cancer.”
After speaking with others, including a former astronomer who transitioned to medical physics, Williams was “struck by how much of what I knew and had learned as an astronomer would actually be useful and apply very directly to medicine.” He explained, “A lot of the math behind (medical) imaging is the exact same math that actually you use in a radio telescope to make an image. It was kind of neat to see that image processing techniques that I’d used as (a radio astronomer) actually carried over pretty directly into medicine.”
At the time of his astronaut selection, Williams was a clinical physicist and researcher at Harvard Medical School. He is the second member of the 2021 astronaut class to journey into space, receiving his assignment to the Soyuz MS-28 mission shortly after completing his astronaut candidate training.
Williams admitted that training for a Russian spacecraft launch was challenging, primarily due to the extensive travel involved. He credited his wife, Aubrey, for maintaining stability in their family life throughout the demanding process.
As for his aspirations during his eight-month stay in space, Williams reiterated a familiar sentiment. “I’ve got a lot of different goals, but I think the biggest one, and the thing I’m most excited about, is to truly be able to put my training into practice and to do a really good job to push forward the science and research that we’re doing on the space station.”
He concluded, “I think it’s incredibly important. I think it’s incredibly interesting and incredibly inspiring, and I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to contribute to that.”