A crew of two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut blasted off Tuesday from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket for the International Space Station, with US-Russia space cooperation pressing on despite the diplomatic standoff over Ukraine, according to the Associated Press.
Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev along with Steve Swanson of NASA took off in a spectacular night-time launch at the start of a fast-track six-hour journey to the orbiting laboratory, where they will spend half a year, the AP reported.
All the stages of the launch went without a hitch and the Soyuz capsule successfully went into the right orbit. Docking with the ISS was expected at 0304 GMT Wednesday, according to the AP.
After the retirement of the US shuttle, NASA is for now wholly reliant on Russia for delivering astronauts to the space station on its tried-and-trusted Soyuz launch and capsule system, the AP reported
Space officials have made clear that space cooperation, one of the few areas of genuine mutual work between Russia and the United States, will continue unaffected by the mounting diplomatic strains that have seen the US impose sanctions on Russian officials over Moscow's seizure of Crimea, according to the AP.
At the pre-flight news conference at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, senior astronauts Skvortsov and Swanson were all smiles behind the glass than protects them from infections from the media and other bystanders, the AP reported.
Skvortsov said that they had decided to have dinners together on board the ISS "as an opportunity to come together as friends in the kitchen and look each other in the eye," according to the AP.
Swanson said that the crew would also been looking forward to watching the football World Cup in Brazil, which will take place during their mission, the AP reported.
Skvortsov is making his second spaceflight, and Swanson, a veteran of two past shuttle missions, is making his third, according to the AP.
Artemyev meanwhile is making his first voyage to space but took part in a 2009 experiment where volunteers were shut up in a capsule at a Moscow laboratory for 105 days to simulate the effects of a possible voyage to Mars, the AP reported.
After docking, the trio will bring the ISS crew up to six by joining on board incumbent crew Koichi Wakata of Japan, American Rick Mastracchio and Russian Mikhail Tyurin, according to the AP.
