Three astronauts have docked with the global Space Station and are joining three existing members on board the station for the next five months.
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The Soyuz-FG rocket lifted off into an early morning sky over Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 03:02 a.m. local time on Thursday (21:03 UTC, 17:03 p.m. EDT on Wednesday).
It was a textbook launch, with Kononenko declaring everything “nominal”, meaning normal, about 20 minutes after liftoff.
Soyuz TMA-17M on the launch pad in Baikonur. The trio comprises of Commander Oleg Kononenko from Roscosmos; flight engineer Kjell Lindgren from NASA and Kimiya Yui from JAXA.
Though Russian investigators were confident the issue was isolated to a single Soyuz-Progress variant and would not affect crewed flights, NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, opted to delay the launch schedule while the investigation continued. They are led by Soyuz commander Oleg Kononenko. This will be Yui’s first mission to the ISS. The group of three will join the crew already stationed on the ISS. After separating, the craft began orbiting Earth before being slung toward ISS.
Astronauts will be allowed to eat half of the second crop of lettuce in the veggie investigation, freezing the other half for a return to Earth where scientists will analyse the plants and compare them to a control set grown at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre.
The space lab is one of the few areas of cooperation between Russian Federation and the United States that has not been hit by the crisis in Ukraine. The Soyuz returned to flight on July 3, successfully launching a replacement load of cargo to the station.
The two failed USA missions to the station both involved resupply missions.
This will be Lindgren’s first time in space.
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But over the past few years, Russian Federation has suffered several major setbacks, notably losing expensive satellites and unmanned supply ships to the ISS.
