Soyuz with US-Russian crew reaches space station in 3 hours

14 de octubre de 2020, 12:42Moscow, Oct 14 (Prensa Latina) The Soyuz-2.1a rocket on Wednesday left from platform 31 at the Kazakh Baikonur cosmodrome to take the Russian manned Soyuz MC-17 spacecraft with three cosmonauts on board, local television reported. They have begun a two-orbit, three-hour flight to reach the International Space Station and join the Expedition 63 crew.

Journeys to the ISS usually take around six hours - a time that was a vast improvement on the two-day flights that prevailed prior to 2013.

Wednesday's crewed journey even beat the fastest time for missions just carrying supplies to the station.

Roscosmos confirmed the successful docking of the Soyuz spacecraft in a tweet.

Speaking during Tuesday's pre-launch news conference at Baikonur, Rubins emphasized that the crew spent weeks in quarantine at the Star City training facility outside Moscow and then on Baikonur to avoid any threat from the coronavirus. Just an uncrewed Progress freight space transport has recently utilized this profile which requires only two circles before docking. The Crew-1 is now scheduled to launch some time in November according to NASA's blog. The delay is meant to give SpaceX more time to conduct tests and review data from an aborted Falcon 9 launch earlier this month.

But the men and women that fly to the space station have played down talk of competition and focused instead on space travel's ability to bring rival nations together for a common cause.

Before joining the US space agency, NASA, Rubins worked as a microbiologist and was involved in research on viruses.

Ryzhikov, a 46-year-old previous military pilot, has gone through 173 days in space contrasted with Rubins' 115 while Kud-Sverchkov, 37, is flying unexpectedly.

The ISS, which has been for all time involved since 2000, has been an uncommon case of collaboration among Moscow and Washington.