Astronauts blast off

Washington/Almaty: A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan yesterday and successfully reached orbit, footage broadcast by Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, showed.

The crew members travelling to the International Space Station are Kate Rubins, a Nasa microbiologist who in 2016 became the first person to sequence DNA in space, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey KudSverchkov.

The mission is the last scheduled Russian flight carrying a US crew member. — Reuters