Astronauts blast off to ISS after failed try

Astronauts have blasted off to the International Space Station (ISS) less than two months after the previous Soyuz mission failed. Astronauts Anne Mcclain from American space agency Nasa, David Saint-jacques from the Canadian Space Agency and Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos left aboard the Russian spacecraft from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan just after 11:31am GMT.

The latest trip to the ISS comes after two astronauts from the US and Russia were forced to make an emergency landing on 11 October, following an emergency shutdown of the three-stage booster at its second stage.

Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’s Alexei Ovchinin safely landed back on Earth in an emergency capsule shortly after taking off. The incident was the first manned launch failure for the Russian space programme since September 1983, when a Soyuz craft exploded on the launch pad.