Nasa astronaut Chris Williams will serve as a flight engineer for Expedition 74 on his first ISS mission

NASA has announced that astronaut Chris Williams will embark on his first mission to the International Space Station (ISS), where he will serve as a flight engineer and a crew member of Expedition 74.

Williams will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft in November 2025, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. Following their launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the trio will spend approximately eight months aboard the orbiting laboratory.

During his expedition, Williams will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations aimed at preparing humans for future space missions and benefiting humanity.

Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Williams graduated with the 23rd astronaut class in 2024. He began training for his first space station flight assignment immediately after completing his initial astronaut candidate training.

Williams was born in New York City and considers Potomac, Maryland, his hometown. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Stanford University in California and a doctorate in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where his research focused on astrophysics.

Williams completed his Medical Physics Residency training at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He was working as a clinical physicist and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston when he was selected as an astronaut.

For more than two decades, people have continuously lived and worked aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and achieving research breakthroughs not possible on Earth.

The station serves as a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight while also expanding commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit.

As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations, NASA is able to concentrate its resources more fully on deep space missions to the Moon and Mars.