French astronaut Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency (ESA) became the new commander of the International Space Station (ISS) as of October 4, taking over the role from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide.
Pesquet will assume the role for a month before he returns to Earth in November. Under his command, the ISS crew will experience a little excitement as the Russian film crew for the first movie shot in space will arrive soon.
Responsibilities of Commander of the International Space Station
French public radio service broadcasting Radio France Internationale (RFI) reported that Pesquet is the first French national to become the commander of the International Space Station, but he will be its 53rd astronaut and the fourth European to do so.
He will be in charge of six crew members, of which three are from NASA, two from Roscosmos, and one from JAXA until the end of his Alpha mission in November.
As part of his tasks as a commander, Pesquet maintains the communications between the station's crew and the flight director, who is based on Earth. More so, ESA's first ISS commander Frank de Winne said that it is the commander's responsibility to make sure the team gets along well and that their scientific jobs are done.
Even though the commander does not pilot the floating laboratory, he gets full authority to make decisions during emergencies without waiting for ground control to intervene. But in the 21 years since the ISS was launched, there have never been any serious incidents that warrant this kind of response.
In a blog post, NASA reported that the symbolic change of command ceremony happened on October 4 at 3:20 p.m. EDT and was streamed on the agency's website and NASA app.
The ESA news release quoted Thomas saying: "I have been blessed to live and work with commander Aki Hoshide, and with commander Peggy Whitson and Shane Kimbrough during my first mission, so I could learn and watch how it is done from the best. Now I just have to follow in their footsteps for the last part of Expedition 65."
The Arrival of the Russian Film Crew for the First Movie Shot in Space
Meanwhile, RFI also reported that a historic event would take place under the command of Pesquet as the ISS team welcomes the imminent arrival of a Russian film crew. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, will launch actress Yulia Pereslid, film director Klim Shipenko, and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov aboard a Soyuz spacecraft at 4:55 a.m. Eastern time and will dock at 8:12 a.m.
The Russian film crew will stay on the space station for 12 days to shoot scenes for the movie, announced in September last year after four months since a Hollywood project featuring Tom Cruise was unveiled.
According to Shipenko, the movie is a dramatic film about a doctor going to the ISS to save a cosmonaut's life. He added that the three cosmonauts, Shkaplerov and the two cosmonauts currently onboard the ISS, Oleg Novitsky, and Pyotr Dubrov, will appear in the film.
At the end of the Alpha mission, Pesquet will hand over the commander role to Shkaplerov as the station crew transition to Expedition 66. ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer of Crew-3 is expected to arrive on the ISS next month with a targeted launch date of October 30.
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