Astronauts heading to the International Space Station in a Soyuz rocket for the first time since its emergency landing, say they are “psychologically and physically prepared.”
Their launch comes less than two months after a booster failure forced Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague to make an emergency landing.
Ahead of Monday's launch, crew commander Oleg Kononenko said: “Risk is part of our profession.
"We are psychologically and technically prepared for blast-off and any situation which, God forbid, may occur on board.”
The Russian astronaut has already logged 533 days in space.
He will be joined by Canadian David Saint-Jacques and American astronaut Anne McClain. It will be the pair’s first trip to the station.
The launch had originally been scheduled for December 20 however the current crew on the ISS needs to return to Earth.
Russia’s Rocosmos space agency has confirmed that the previous aborted mission was caused by a faulty sensor.
The astronauts were forced to make an emergency landing in the Kazakhstan grasslands.
At the time of the incident, Rocosmos executive director Sergei Krikalyov said: “The original plan was the current crew will return in the middle of December and the next one will replace it shortly afterwards. In order to avoid shifting the ISS to an unmanned mode the industry is exerting considerable efforts to make the launch possible on December 3.”
It was the first manned launch failure for the Russian space programme since September 1983 when a Soyuz exploded on the launch pad.
