dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Astronauts take off for space station on Russian rocket after October crash

A Russian, an American and a Canadian astronaut have taken off for the international space station in the first manned launch of a Soyuz rocket since a crash in October.

Monday's launch was a test for Russia's space industry, which has suffered several high-profile crashes in recent years but remains the only reliable way to deliver crew members to the orbiting station.

Space station veteran and mission commander Oleg Kononenko, 54, Quebec family doctor David Saint-Jacques, 48, and Anne McClain, 39, a US army helicopter pilot who earned masters degrees from the University of Bath and Bristol in the UK, are scheduled to blast off at 2:30pm Moscow time from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

If all goes as planned, six hours later they will dock with the space station.

They will start from the same launchpad that Yuri Gagarin did when he became the first man in space in 1961.

The trio will be flying in the same kind of Soyuz launch craft and FG rocket booster that crashed at Baikonur in October, nearly costing the lives of Russian commander Alexei Ovchinin and Nasa astronaut Nick Hague.

The rocket suddenly plunged toward the ground a little more than two minutes after takeoff, forcing the the capsule to jettison and parachute the crew to safety.

Russia's space agency found the cause of the crash to be a component in the booster separation system that was damaged during installation. Its specialists have since fixed the sensor problem, it said.

Arianespace launched a European weather satellite into orbit on an unmanned Soyuz rocket last month.

Monday's mission follows a scare at the space station in August when a drop in pressure was traced to a small hole in a panel in a Soyuz MS-09 module, which had docked with the station in June.

Russian officials at one point suggested American astronauts had drilled the hole to sabotage the mission.

On Friday, Russia launched three communications satellites into space and an unidentified fourth object that some think could be a new spy satellite.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/astronauts-try-space-station-russian-110513455.html