A Russian spacecraft launched from Kazakhstan‘s Baikonur cosmodrome on Friday, carrying two Russian cosmonauts and a US astronaut to join the International Space Station (ISS), as seen on live TV. At 1853 GMT, the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft, with American Loral O’Hara and Russians Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on board, successfully docked at the ISS, according to Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.
They will join the current crew, which includes NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Frank Rubio, Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin, Konstantin Borisov, and Sergei Prokopyev, along with Denmark’s Andreas Mogensen and Japan’s Satoshi Furukawa. O’Hara and Chub are on their debut spaceflight, while Kononenko is on his fifth.
Russia’s space program faced a significant setback last month when its Luna-25 spacecraft crashed during an attempt to land near the moon’s south pole, marking the country’s first lunar mission in 47 years.
Despite tensions in other areas due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions by the United States, the ISS remains one of the few international projects where the two countries continue to collaborate closely.