A Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts launched toward the International Space Station yesterday, marking the 500th manned launch in space travel history.
The trio — including the first Danish citizen ever to fly into space — blasted off in the Soyuz TMA-18M rocket on schedule at 4:37am GMT from the same launchpad that Yuri Gagarin used for his historic entry into the cosmos in 1961.
“The crew is doing well, everything is in order onboard,” mission control in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, said.
Photo: AP
Veteran cosmonaut Sergei Volkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos is leading a team that also includes first-time flyers Aidyn Aimbetov from Kazakhstan (Kazcosmos) and Andreas Mogensen from Denmark (European Space Agency).
They are expected to make the journey to the space station in two days, docking tomorrow at about 7:42am GMT. Volkov is to stay on at the station, while both Aimbetov and Mogensen are to return to Earth on Soyuz TMA-16M on Saturday next week.
Mogensen is the first Dane to enter space, while Aimbetov, who replaced British singer Sarah Brightman after the 54-year-old pulled out of the mission in June, is the third from his nation to do so.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s a great honor for me to represent Denmark as an astronaut,” Mogensen said in a Google Hangout organized by the European Space Agency last month.
Mogensen, 38, is accompanied by 26 custom-made Lego models provided especially for the mission by the Danish toy manufacturer, as well as writings of Danish philosopher Sxren Kierkegaard. Aimbetov, 43, took dried horse milk and several other national staples from the Central Asian nation into space with him, as well as a toy from his daughter, who said she hoped he would encounter alien life.
At a news conference ahead of the flight on Tuesday, Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Berdibek Saparbaev said that Volkov’s cosmonaut father Alexander Volkov accompanied the first-ever Kazakh cosmonaut to enter space, Toktar Aubakirov, on a 1991 mission.
“Now you have continued this line by becoming the commander of the crew in which our Aidyn Aimbetov is flying,” Saparbaev said.
The launch from Baikonur was the first since July 23, when Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and US and Japanese astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yu set off on a 163-day mission.
Prior to that, Russia had put all space travel on hold after the failure of the unmanned Progress freighter in late April. The doomed ship lost contact with Earth and burned up in the atmosphere, forcing a group of astronauts to spend an extra month on the space station.
In May, another Russian craft, a Proton-M rocket carrying a Mexican satellite, malfunctioned and crashed in Siberia soon after its launch.
Space travel is one of the few facets of international cooperation between Russia and the West that has remained unaffected by the Ukraine crisis.
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