Expedition 59

Expedition 59 was a six-person International Space Station increment commanded by Oleg Kononenko. It began on March 15, 2019, when Soyuz MS-12 docked and brought Alexey Ovchinin, Nick Hague, and Christina Koch aboard to join Kononenko, David Saint-Jacques, and Anne McClain. Spacefacts notes that this boundary was an exception to the usual expedition handover pattern, used to restore the ISS expedition sequence after the Soyuz MS-10 launch abort. During Expedition 59, the crew supported station operations, cargo traffic, spacewalks, and a research program that NASA highlighted for tissue-chip studies, free-flying Astrobee robots, external science facilities, and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 investigation of carbon dioxide on Earth. The increment included U.S. battery-upgrade spacewalks by McClain, Hague, Koch, and Saint-Jacques, plus a Russian-segment spacewalk by Kononenko and Ovchinin. Expedition 59 ended on June 24, 2019, when Soyuz MS-11 undocked with Kononenko, Saint-Jacques, and McClain, transferring station command to Ovchinin for Expedition 60.