For their bravery and high professionalism shown while performing their duty under high-risk life-threatening conditions in an emergency at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin is awarded with an Order of Courage, reads the Decree of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin No. 70 of January 30, 2020.

To recap, after a carrier rocket failure on October 11, 2018 during the launch, Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague went through a rehabilitation period and together with NASA astronaut Christina Koch took off to the International Space Station onboard the Soyuz MS-12 crewed spacecraft on a Soyuz-FG carrier rocket on March 14, 2019.

During the ISS-59/60 mission lasting more than 202 days, Alexey Ovchinin conducted about 50 experiments according to the Russian scientific program including works with Skybot F-850 humanoid. On May 29-30, 2019 together with Oleg Kononenko, Alexey Ovchinin performed his first spacewalk lasting 6 hours and one minute. Ovchinin’s total time spent in space during the two spaceflights is 374 days, 19 hours and 11 minutes.

The same decree awards cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev with an Order of Merit for Country of the IV Degree for his bravery and high professionalism shown while performing a long-term spaceflight on the ISS.

Oleg Artemyev performed his second spaceflight on March 21 till October 4 as the Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft commander and ISS-55/56 mission flight engineer together with NASA astronauts Andrew Feustel and Richard Arnold. Artemyev’s total time spent in space topped one year. During his two spaceflights, Oleg Artemyev performed three spacewalks lasting more than 20 hours in total.

Previously, Oleg Artemyev issued his first photobook where he tells and shows what ISS looks like, what experiments are conducted aboard, as well as other interesting facts.