NASA Astronaut Preps for First Space Station Mission, Available for Media Interviews

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Jun 30, 2015, 02:42 ET

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, who is making final preparations for his launch next month on his first mission to the International Space Station, will be available for live satellite interviews from 8 to 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 7.

Lindgren will participate from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. The interviews will be preceded at 7:30 a.m. by a video on NASA Television highlighting his mission training.

To schedule an interview, media must contact Stephanie Stoll at 281-483-9071 or [email protected] no later than 3 p.m. Monday, July 6. Media participating in the live shots must tune to NTV-3. Satellite tuning information is available at:

http://go.nasa.gov/1pOWUhR

Lindgren hails from the Midwest but spent most of his childhood in England. Board certified in emergency and aerospace medicine, Lindgren is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Lindgren received his medical degree from the University of Colorado and began working as a flight surgeon at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2007 before his selection to the astronaut corps in 2009.

His space station mission team includes cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The three are scheduled to launch to the station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft at 5:02 p.m. July 22 (3:02 a.m. July 23, Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

They will join the Expedition 44 crew of NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, who launched to the station in March, marking the start of a one-year mission for Kelly and Kornienko.

Together the six crew members will continue the several hundred experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science currently underway and scheduled to take place aboard humanity's only orbiting laboratory.

Lindgren is scheduled to return to Earth with crew members Kononenko and Yui in late December.

Follow Lindgren on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/astro_kjell

Follow Expedition 44 and 45 crew members on Instagram at:

http://instagram.com/iss

For more information about NASA TV coverage, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

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SOURCE NASA