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An international trio blasted off Wednesday on top of a Russian Soyuz rocket for the International Space Station with a busy schedule full of space walks and a docking with a pioneering US cargo craft.
The six-month mission of Russian commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and his two flight engineers — Karen Nyberg of NASA and Italy’s Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency — will begin as soon as their Soyuz capsule docks to the orbiting lab later Wednesday.
The Soyuz is taking a shortcut that slashes the travel time from two days to just six hours thanks to a special orbit that boosts the astronauts directly to their destination.
The abridged journey has rarely been tried in the past because it puts a bigger stress on the astronauts’ bodies.
But one such trip was successfully completed earlier this year and Russia decided to repeat the experience with a view to making the six-hour journey into a mainstay of future travel to the ISS.
The Soyuz rocket blasted off without a hitch into the night sky from Russia’s Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan on Tuesday at 2031 GMT and was due to dock to the ISS on Wednesday at 0216 GMT.