Soyuz TMA-18M is a Soyuz spaceflight planned for September 2015. It will provide the two twelve-months occupants at the International Space Station with a fresh Soyuz capsule. TMA-18M will be the 127th flight of a Soyuz spacecraft; the first occurred in 1967. The ascent flight will consist of a Russian commander and a Danish flight engineer accompanied by a British space tourist.

It will be the first launch of a spaceflight participant since Soyuz TMA-16 in September 2009. The descent crew will be the same Russian commander and the two twelve-months occupants in March 2016.

Update: Originally the third member should have been the British singer Sarah Brightman as a space tourist, but on May 13, 2015, she announced she had withdrawn from training.

According to the Russian media, Kazakh government would pay $20 million or 2.5 times less for the mission, than a going charge for a private tourist, such as Brightman.

Japanese entrepreneur Satoshi Takamatsu trained as Sarah Brightman's backup, but he withdrew from the flight as the art projects he had planned to carry out would not be ready by the September launch date. He stated he would try for a later flight when his projects were ready to fly.

Soyuz TMA-18M was a 2015 Soyuz spaceflight to the International Space Station. It provided the two twelve-months occupants (Scott Kelly and Mikhail Korniyenko) at the International Space Station with a fresh Soyuz capsule. TMA-18M was the 127th flight of a Soyuz spacecraft; the first having occurred in 1967. The ascent flight consisted of a Russian commander and two flight engineers from Denmark (ESA) and Kazakhstan respectively. The flight launched in September 2015 and returned to Earth in March 2016.

The Kazakh Aidyn Aimbetov is of the first Kazakh cosmonaut class, and the first to fly. The ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen became the first Dane in space.

The descent crew was the same Russian commander and the two twelve-months occupants in March 2016. Two of the ascent crew members returned to Earth with Soyuz TMA-16M in September 2015.

Another space junk avoidance maneuver performed by the ISS on July 26, prompted mission planners to default to a two-day, 34-orbit rendezvous profile, resulting with the launch on Sept. 2, 2015, at 07:37 Moscow Time and docking at the ISS on Sept. 4, 2015, at 10:42 Moscow Time. The solar activity during the previous month turned out to be lower than predicted resulting in less atmospheric drag on the station. As a result, the ISS ended up to be beyond the orbital parameters that would be required for a six-hour rendezvous. In turn, an orbit-lowering maneuver would require extra propellant expenditure and push the September 12 landing of Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft beyond the southern edge of the landing area in Kazakhstan. The only alternative way to provide a six-hour rendezvous for Soyuz TMA-18M would be to postpone the launch from September 2, which would result in its own domino effect of changes in the ISS program.

After spending 340 days onboard the International Space Station, ISS, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly landed in Kazakhstan. They landed onboard the Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft accompanied by the ship's original pilot Sergei Volkov, who logged nearly 182 days in orbit. Volkov's former crew mates on the way to the station, Andreas Mogensen and Aidyn Aimbetov, returned to Earth onboard the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft on Sept. 12, 2015.

Scott Kelly made a formal handover of the station's command to a fellow NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra on February 29.

The actual departure activities started a day later, with a hatch closure between Soyuz TMA-18M and the station, which took place at 4:43 p.m. EST on March 1.

Crew members will then don their Sokol entry suits and take seats inside the descent module of the Soyuz spacecraft. Sergei Volkov, the ship's commander, will occupy the center seat, with Kornienko to his left and Kelly sitting in the right-hand position.

According to the Russian mission control center in Korolev, the undocking command was to be issued 1.5 minutes before the physical separation between the MIM2 (Poisk) module on the Russian segment and Soyuz TMA-18M, during the outpost's 98,831st orbit and the transport ship's 2,831st orbit around the Earth.

The undocking took place as scheduled on March 2, 2016, at 04:02:30 Moscow Time (8:02 p.m. EST on March 1), as the two spacecraft were flying over Eastern Mongolia. Three minutes later, the Soyuz made its first maneuver with its small thrusters to increase its distance from the ISS. Another small firing was performed one minute 20 seconds later.