Soyuz MS-13, also designated ISS flight 59S, was a crewed
Soyuz Soyuz is a transliteration of the Cyrillic text Союз ( Russian and Ukrainian, 'Union'). It can refer to any union, such as a trade union (''profsoyuz'') or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Сою́з Сове́тских Социалис ...
moon landing
A Moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both crewed and robotic missions. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2, on 13 September 1959.
The United S ...
– carrying three members of the Expedition 60 crew to the
International Space Station
The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ( ...
: a Russian commander, an American and a European flight engineer. Soyuz MS-13 was the 142nd flight of a Soyuz spacecraft. It was at one point the last Soyuz flight contracted by NASA in the expectation that subsequent astronaut transport would be provided by the
Commercial Crew Program
The Commercial Crew Program (CCP) provides commercially-operated crew transportation service to and from the International Space Station (ISS) under contract to NASA, conducting crew rotations between the expeditions of the International S ...
, but in early 2019 NASA sought to purchase two additional Soyuz seats to provide greater certainty given delays in that program.
Crew
Backup crew
Relocation
The Soyuz crew relocated the MS-13 spacecraft from the aft port of the ''Zvezda'' module and performed a manual docking on the ''Poisk'' module on 26 August 2019. This cleared the way for Soyuz MS-14 to perform an automatic docking on ''Zvezda'', after a faulty signal amplifier on ''Poisk'' caused MS-14's first docking attempt to abort on 24 August 2019. The last time a Soyuz spacecraft was relocated was in August 2015 during the