New crew, including first British astronaut, enjoys easy ride to space station

Sir Elton John wished astronaut Tim Peake good luck before he set off on a space mission today (15.12.15).

Other movies that have screened aboard ISS this past year have mostly been space-related; among them are The Martian and Gravity.

“Don’t Stop Me Now” by the rock group Queen was blaring in the Soyuz roughly half an hour before blastoff as the astronauts listened to their favourite music in preparation for the mission.

Major Peake along with Russian commander Yuri Malenchenko and NASA astronaut Tim Kopra were greeted by the existing crew of the ISS, which travels around the Earth at 17,500mph at an average height of 220 miles.

Peake s mission has generated considerable excitement in Britain.

In Peake s hometown of Chichester in southeastern England, the launch was shown at his old school.

Accrording to Space.com, a furnace will be installed in the Japanese module so the crew can investigate how flame combustion behaves in microgravity, and they’ll be testing out an inflatable capsule that could one day be used as a portable habitat orbiting Earth, on perhaps even on the Moon or Mars.

“It is all quite emotional for me”.

“We ll be enjoying the fantastic view of planet Earth and our thoughts will be with everyone on Earth enjoying Christmas and with our friends and family”, he said.

A statement read: “We hope that Major Peake’s work on the Space Station will serve as an inspiration to a new generation of scientists and engineers”. Analyzing these microbes can help determine whether some are more virulent in space, and which genetic changes might be involved in this response.

On the eve of Peake s departure, the British government unveiled an ambitious new space policy. Already aboard are Russians Sergey Volkov and Mikhail Korniyenko, along with American Scott Kelly.

The last support tower peeled away precisely to plan in the moments before the four vast booster rockets of the Soyuz FG rocket and its powerful core engines were ignited at 11.03 London time yesterday morning, lifting the tiny manned capsule on top of the three rocket stages with 422.5 tonnes of thrust, some 26 million horsepower.

Soyuz TMA-19 arriving at the International Space Station.

The flight to the ISS is estimated to take only six hours.