Despite severely strained U.S.-Russian foreign relations, an American astronaut joined two Russian cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz spacecraft in Kazakhstan and rocketed into orbit Wednesday on a two-orbit flight to the International Space Station.
Standing by to welcome them aboard were Expedition 67 commander Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, who launched last March aboard the Soyuz MS-21/67S ferry ship. Also on board the ISS: SpaceX Crew 4 commander Kjell Lindgren and his three crewmates, Robert Hines, Jessica Watkins and Cristoforetti, a European Space Agency astronaut.
Soyuz flight engineer Dmitry Petelin, left, commander Sergey Prokopyev, center, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio wave farewell to family, friends and supporters before suiting up and heading to the launch for blastoff on a flight to the International Space Station."From the ISS side, I think it is very important in that it gives us redundancy and the ability to respond to unforeseen circumstances," Rubio said in a pre-launch interview with CBS News.
Four days later, the Crew Dragon Endurance is scheduled for launch from Florida carrying Crew 5 commander Nicole Mann, pilot Josh Cassada, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina. Including a piloted test flight, the launching will mark SpaceX's seventh crewed station mission.
Russian Soyuz spacecraft carried joint crews to the lab complex between the shuttle's retirement in 2011 and the debut of SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which began carrying astronauts to orbit in 2020. Those seats cost NASA up to $90 million each. The Russians provide the propellant and rocket power needed to keep the station in orbit and to dodge space debris while NASA provides most of the lab's electrical power, near-continuous communications and the massive gyroscopes that keep the outpost properly oriented. Crews are not cross-trained to operate each other's systems.
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