Joint US-Russian crew reaches space station

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 on an express route to the station, which orbits about 250 miles above Earth. 

Less than six hours after liftoff, veteran Russian commander Oleg Kotov and rookies Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia and Michael Hopkins of the United States reached the outpost, a $100 billion project of 15 nations. 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 returns 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 with backing from NASA, blasted off aboard an Antares rocket on September 18 from a new launch pad on the Virginia coast. 

Hopkins and Ryazanskiy are making their first flights. Kotov, who will take over command of the station when Yurchikhin leaves in November, has made two previous long-duration missions on the station.   

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.   

The torch is scheduled to be delivered to the station on November 6 by the next crew launching to the outpost. Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano will then bring it back to Earth when they return home four days later so the traditional torch relay can continue.    

An Olympic torch previously flew aboard NASA's now-retired space shuttle Atlantis prior to the 1996 Olympics.


REUTERS