NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson conducted live satellite interviews from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, on Thursday, Oct. 27. Whitson, and her Expedition 50/51 crewmates, Oleg Novitskiy of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and astronaut Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency), will launch to the space station on Nov. 15, U.S. time, aboard a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. During her stay in space, Whitson will become the first woman to have commanded the space station twice. During Expedition 16 in 2007, she became the first woman ever to command the station. That flight and her first mission to the space station, as a flight engineer for Expedition 5 in 2002, give her a current total of 377 days in space. Whitson is scheduled to return to Earth with Novitskiy and Pesquet in May.
