(Reuters) – A Russian spacecraft blasted off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome on Friday carrying two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut to join the crew of the International Space Station, live TV images showed.
The Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft with American Loral O’Hara and Russians Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on board was due to dock to the ISS at 1856 GMT.
They will join the current crew of NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Frank Rubio, Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin, Konstantin Borisov and Sergei Prokopyev, as well as Denmark’s Andreas Mogensen and Japan’s Satoshi Furukawa.
O’Hara and Chub are on their first spaceflight, and Kononenko on his fifth.
Russia’s space programme suffered a major setback last month when its Luna-25 spacecraft crashed during an attempt to land near the south pole of the moon in the first Russian lunar mission for 47 years.
The ISS is one of the few international projects on which the United States and Russia still cooperate closely. Relations in other areas have virtually broken down since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to which Washington responded by arming Kyiv and imposing successive rounds of sanctions on Moscow.
(Reporting by Reuters, Editing by William Maclean)
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