Watch Maine Astronaut Jessica Meir Launch Into Space Live

Caribou native Jessica Meir will become the third person and first woman from Maine to fly into into space as she takes off from Kazakhstan on her way to the International Space Station and you can watch the launch live.

NASA TV will be providing live coverage of the launch beginning at 9 a.m. leading up to the 9:45 scheduled launch.

41-year old Jessica Meir graduated from Caribou High School and went on to become an Assistant Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. She has studied the diving physiology and behavior of emperor penguins in Antarctica and has a Master of Space Studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.

In 2013 she was named an astronaut candidate by NASA and will make her first trip into space Wednesday on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with two other Russian cosmonauts.

Liftoff is scheduled for 9:45 a.m. Eastern time which is 6:57 p.m. in Kazakhstan. It will take six hours to reach the International Space Station. That's about the time it would take her to drive from her hometown of Caribou to Logan in Boston to catch a flight.