Technology
During their five-month stay, Kotov and Ryazanskiy are scheduled to make three spacewalks, the first of which will include taking an unlighted Olympic torch outside the airlock to promote the Sochi Olympic Games in Russia, which open in February 2014
Updated : Mar 11, 2018, 05:42 AM IST
A Russian Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday to deliver three new crew members to the International Space Station. The Soyuz rocket and capsule lifted off at 4:58 p.m. EDT/2058 GMT on an express route to the station, which orbits about 250 miles (about 400 km) above Earth.
Veteran Russian commander Oleg Kotov and rookies Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia and Michael Hopkins of the United States were expected to reach the outpost less than six hours after liftoff.
Only two other crews have made the journey as quickly. Previous Soyuz capsules took two days of orbital maneuvers to reach the station. The arrival of Kotov, Ryazanskiy and Hopkins will return the station to its full, six-member live-aboard crew. Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano have been running the station on their own since September 10.
The skeleton crew was to have overseen the arrival of a commercial cargo ship on a test flight to the station this week. But a software problem left the unmanned Cygnus freighter unable to receive navigation data properly from the station, delaying its arrival until no earlier than Saturday to avoid conflicting with the Soyuz's berthing. Typically, at least 48 hours are needed between spacecraft dockings. The cargo ship, built and launched by Orbital Sciences