The number of astronauts in space has reached a new high. As many as 19 humans are currently in the low-Earth orbit at different locations. The bunch of travellers is composed of astronauts from NASA, SpaceX and those launched by China to its Tiangong Space Station. Notably, this is the highest number of humans in space at once.

The first and foremost is the International Space Station (ISS) with the biggest crew of 12 astronauts. The number was bumped up with the arrival of NASA's Don Pettit and Aleksey Ovchinin with Ivan Vagner from Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

They arrived at the space station at 1:02 am IST on September 12, three hours after the Soyuz spacecraft launched by Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The station crew number would have been nine if Boeing's Starliner was safe to bring Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore back to Earth.

ALSO SEE: Watch Starliner Land Without Sunita Williams After Failed ISS Mission

They launched to the ISS on June 5 for Boeing's 8-day Crew Flight Test mission. But the spacecraft malfunctioned and returned empty on September 7. The duo will now stay in space until SpaceX rescues them in February 2025.

The other astronauts are Ye Guangfu, Li Cong, Li Guangsu from China living and working aboard the Tiangong Space Station. They launched to space as the Shenzhou-18 crew on April 24 this year.

And the third crew consists of the Polaris Dawn astronauts launched by SpaceX on September 10. Four members of it reached the highest-Earth orbit for the first time since December 1972 and are set to perform the first-ever spacewalk in a commercial mission today. More about it here. This number will remain intact until the Polaris crew returns on September 14.

ALSO SEE: SpaceX Shares First Views Of Earth As Polaris Dawn Reaches Highest Orbit In 50 Years

(Image: NASA/SpaceX)