Soyuz spacecraft launched with 3 astronauts for ISS

The Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft is raised vertical after its rollout was rolled out at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The first manned transport spacecraft of a new series Soyuz MS with a crew of three onboard has separated from the third stage of the Soyuz-FG carrier rocket and is heading for the International Space Station (ISS), a spokesman for Russian state space corporation Roscosmos said. Eastern time Wednesday (GMT-4, 7:36 a.m. Thursday local time), is the first flight since the Soyuz ferry craft has been upgraded.

It will take less than 10 minutes for the Soyuz rocket to reach orbit, but the crew will take a two-day route to the space station instead of the more typical six-hour approach pursued by recent Soyuz missions.

During their two days in orbit, the three crewmembers will test out a number of upgrades to the Soyuz spacecraft, NASA officials said in a statement. In those four months in space, they’ll run over 250 science experiments-including the first-ever DNA sequencing in space.

It will be the first spaceflight for Rubins and Onishi and the second one for Ivanishin, who spent 165 days in the ISS in 2011-2012.

The spacecraft features an improved docking mechanism, better micrometeoroid shielding, upgraded solar arrays, an additional set of batteries and a reusable “black box” device to record and store a variety of parameters.

Rubins’ launch caps an exciting week for Nasa as the USA space agency’s unmanned Juno spacecraft entered orbit around distant Jupiter Tuesday after a journey of almost five years. After arriving at the ISS, the crew will be welcomed by Expedition 48 NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams and Russian cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka. They will travel to become the part of the crew on the International Space Station (ISS). Out of view to her left are commander Anatoly Ivanishin and flight engineer Takuya Onishi.

Just because 47 missions have blasted humans up to the International Space Station doesn’t mean it doesn’t blow us away every time.