He becomes the ninth Canadian Space Agency astronaut to fly to space.

Longueuil, Quebec, December 3, 2018 – Today, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut David Saint-Jacques successfully launched to the International Space Station (ISS) with crewmates, NASA astronaut Anne McClain and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko.

The Expedition 58 crew took off aboard a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 6:31 a.m. ET (5:31 p.m. local time in Kazakhstan). Saint-Jacques will spend over six months aboard the orbiting laboratory, supporting world-class science and time-critical operations. With a scheduled landing in June 2019, this will be Canada's longest mission to date.

While in space, Saint-Jacques will operate Canadarm2 and perform maintenance duties. He will conduct science experiments and technology demonstrations, including ground-breaking Canadian health science experiments that will make space travel safer for humans. This work is also helping us better understand the human body on Earth. He could also perform a spacewalk.

This mission begins on the cusp of the 20th anniversary of the ISS—twenty years of peaceful international collaboration and breakthrough science in service of life on Earth, in the largest and most complex engineering project in human history.