Three more astronauts have arrived at the International Space Station to begin a five-month mission. Flight TMA-17M took off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 21.02 GMT on Wednesday and docked less than six hours later.
This is the 126th flight of the Soyuz launcher since its maiden voyage in 1967. Its crew consists of the Russian Oleg Kononenko, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and the Nasa astronaut Kjell Lindgren.
Kononenko is a veteran cosmonaut, having been selected in 1996. He already has 391 days in space under his belt. The other two are on their first journey to orbit. Together they form part of the ISS’s Expedition 44.
British astronaut Tim Peake served as part of the back-up crew for this flight. Now that the cosmonauts are safely in orbit, he can concentrate on his own scheduled mission. This will take place as part of expedition 46, starting in November 2015. It will again begin with a Soyuz launch from Baikonur.
Since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, the US has been forced to join Europe in buying seats on the venerable Russian crew capsule. The US plans to launch its own astronauts again using the seven-person Dragon capsule, designed by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. However, SpaceX suffered a significant setback on 28 June, when one of its Falcon 9 rockets carrying an unmanned Dragon capsule exploded just minutes into the flight.
An investigation has identified a faulty support strut inside the rocket as the likely cause. Setbacks to the Dragon schedule are inevitable.
