Russian-U.S. crew welcomed aboard
MOSCOW >> A trio of space travelers blasted off to the International Space Station on Wednesday, using for the first time a fast-track maneuver that allowed them to reach the orbiting outpost in just a little over three hours.
NASA’s Kate Rubins along with Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud- Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos lifted off as scheduled Wednesday morning from the Russia-leased Baikonur space launch facility in Kazakhstan for a six-month stint on the station.
For the first time, they tried a two- orbit approach and docked with the space station in just a little over three hours after lift- off. Previously it took twice as long for crews to reach the station.
Aboard the station, they were welcomed by the station’s NASA commander, Chris Cassidy, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who have been aboard the complex since April and are scheduled to return to Earth in a week.
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.
“We spent two weeks at Star City and then 17 days at Baikonur in a very strict quarantine,” Rubins said.
She said she was looking forward to scientific experiments planned for the mission.
“We’re planning to try some really interesting things like bio-printing tissues and growing cells in space and, of course, continuing our work on sequencing DNA,” Rubins said.
Ryzhikov, who will be the station’s skipper, said the crew will try to pinpoint the exact location of a leak at a station’s Russian section that has slowly leaked oxygen. The small leak hasn’t posed any immediate danger to the crew.