NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, who is making final preparations for his launch this month to the International Space Station, is available for live satellite interviews from 8 to 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday, May 12.

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

To participate, reporters must contact Karen Svetaka at 281-483-8684 no later than 3 p.m., Monday, May 11. 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, Houston, in 2007 before being selected as an astronaut 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 3:47 p.m. EDT on May 26 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 

They will join the Expedition 44 crew, which includes 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 November.

Lindgren’s biography is available at: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/lindgren-kn.html

Follow Lindgren via Twitter: http://twitter.com/astro_kjell

Follow Expedition 44 and 45 crew members on Instagram: http://instagram.com/iss

For more information about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station

For more information about NASA TV coverage, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv