Soyuz spacecraft with US astronaut, two Russian cosmonauts docks at ISS

[September 18, 2023]  (Reuters) -A Russian spacecraft blasted off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome on Friday carrying two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut to join the crew of the International Space Station (ISS), live TV images showed.  

At 1853 GMT the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft with American Loral O'Hara and Russians Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on board docked at the ISS, Russia's Roscosmos space agency said.

The Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft carrying the crew formed of NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) from the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan September 15, 2023. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

They will join the current crew of NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Frank Rubio, Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin, Konstantin Borisov and Sergei Prokopyev, as well as Denmark's Andreas Mogensen and Japan's Satoshi Furukawa.

O'Hara and Chub are on their first spaceflight, while Kononenko is on his fifth.

Russia's space programme suffered a major setback last month when its Luna-25 spacecraft crashed during an attempt to land near the south pole of the moon in the country's first lunar mission in 47 years.

The ISS is one of the few international projects on which the United States and Russia still cooperate closely. Relations in other areas have broken down since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to which Washington responded by arming Kyiv and imposing successive rounds of sanctions on Moscow.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by William Maclean and Mark Porter)

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