Two Russian cosmonauts and a US astronaut on Friday docked with the International Space Station (ISS) after blasting off amid raging tensions between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine.
Earlier on Friday Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft.
The crew docked at the ISS three hours later, the Russian space agency said.
Photo: Roscosmos space corporation via AP
At the orbiting station, the trio are to join three Russians, two Americans, a Japanese astronaut and a representative of the European Space Agency.
The liftoff took place after Russia’s first lunar mission in nearly 50 years failed last month.
The ISS is a rare venue for cooperation between the US and Russia, whose ties broke down after Moscow unleashed its offensive in Ukraine in February last year.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Kononenko alluded to the tensions during a preflight press conference on Thursday, saying that “unlike on Earth” cosmonauts and astronauts take care of each other in space.
“We hear each other there and we understand each other, and we are very sensitive to our relationships,” he said. “We always take care of each other.”
O’Hara praised the station’s “legacy,” and said it had been bringing the countries together.
“I’m excited to get on board and see the crewmates who are waiting for us,” she added.
Kononenko, 59, and Chub, 39, were scheduled to spend a year on the ISS, while O’Hara, 40, was to spend six months aboard. It was the first mission to space for O’Hara and Chub.
Chub said that traveling to space was his “childhood dream” and he had dedicated “all his life” to reaching that goal.
The three take over from Russians Dmitry Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who have spent one year aboard the ISS.
While that trio was initially supposed to return in March, their mission had to be extended after their vessel, the Soyuz MS-22, was damaged by a suspected tiny meteoroid, resulting in a coolant leak. They are to return to Earth on the Soyuz MS-23, Roscosmos said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is looking to strengthen space cooperation with China as Western condemnation and sanctions over Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine intensify.
On Wednesday, Putin hosted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at the new Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East region, and the two discussed the possibility of sending a North Korean into space.
The rivalry between Asia’s two biggest countries has extended into outer space. After India’s landing of its Chandrayaan-3 rover on the moon last month — becoming the first country to put a spacecraft near the lunar south pole and breaking China’s record for the southernmost lunar landing — a top Chinese scientist has said claims about the accomplishment are overstated. Ouyang Ziyuan (歐陽自遠), lauded as the father of China’s lunar exploration program, told the Chinese-language Science Times newspaper that the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, at 69 degrees south latitude, was nowhere close to the pole, defined as between 88.5 and 90 degrees. On Earth,
SCIENTIFIC TREASURE: Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system, the samples would help scientists better understand how the Earth and life formed NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space on Sunday parachuted into the Utah desert to cap a seven-year journey. In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 100,000km out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the ship set off after another asteroid. “We have touchdown,” mission recovery operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials later said the orange striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated — at about 6,100m — basing it on the deceleration rate. To everyone’s relief, the
Venezuela’s Tocoron prison was like a town all unto itself, boasting restaurants, a pool, a zoo, a playground for inmates’ kids and so much more as a powerful gang ruled the roost, using the facility as a criminal operations center. “Steak House. Enjoy,” read a sign on the wall of one of the restaurants in the prison, which thousands of soldiers and police stormed this week. Tocoron is empty of the 1,600 prisoners who lived here and have been moved elsewhere. Gone is the gang that controlled it — Tren de Aragua, which has tentacles in various Latin American countries. “Life was nicer
A little-known former shipping executive and ex-Goldman Sachs trader on Sunday pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Greek political history after winning the leadership of SYRIZA, the main opposition party. Stefanos Kasselakis, 35, is a self-styled self-made entrepreneur who says he wants to promote transparency, boost labor and social rights, speed up justice, and eliminate perks for bankers and politicians. Picking up more than 56 percent of the vote based on preliminary results, he defeated four other candidates — three of them prominent SYRIZA former ministers — after a whirlwind campaign mostly waged on social media. “We want a Greece where