👩‍🚀 New record: 19 people orbited Earth simultaneously

• Three people were launched towards the International Space Station on September 11.
• This raised the number of people in Earth's orbit to a record-high 19.
• The previous record was 17 people, set last year.

Three new astronauts en route to ISS

A Russian Soyuz capsule lifted off on September 11 with three new crew members on board: NASA astronaut Don Pettit and cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, writes Space.com.

Nine people already on the space station

Nine people were already on the ISS: NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Tracy Caldwell-Dyson, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams, as well as cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko.

Wilmore and Williams were originally scheduled to return to Earth earlier. They were launched in June as part of the Crew Flight Test, the first crewed mission for Boeing's Starliner capsule. The mission was planned to last about 10 days, but Starliner experienced problems with its thrusters in orbit. The astronauts will therefore remain in space for several months.

Chinese space station and free-flying Dragon capsule

In addition to the 12 people on and en route to the ISS, there were seven more people in Earth orbit. Three of them - Li Cong, Li Guangsu and Ye Guangfu - reside on China's Tiangong space station.

The remaining four astronauts - Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon - were in a free-flying Crew Dragon capsule. They were launched on September 10 for the five-day Polaris Dawn mission. Isaacman and Gillis performed the first private spacewalk.

Previous records

The total record for most people in space simultaneously is 20, set in May 2023 and tied on January 26 this year. On both occasions, six space tourists who reached suborbital space aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft joined the 14 people in orbit.

For those using the Kármán line as the boundary of space, the record for "most people in space" is 19, set during the NS-19 flight of Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard vehicle on December 11, 2021 - and now tied with the Soyuz launch.

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