A Russian ship managed to dock with the space station … – BFMTV.COM

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft, carrying on board the first Italian woman in history, docked without incident Monday the International Space Station (ISS), announced NASA. The ship, which is moored at 2:49 GMT, carrying in addition to Samantha Cristoforetti a Russian cosmonaut, Anton Shkaplerov, and an American astronaut Terry Virts.

In the night Black Kazakh steppes, the Soyuz TMA-15M lifted off from Baikonur at 9:01 p.m. GMT. “A new ship has arrived. It is confirmed that the Soyuz is properly stowed” on station above the Pacific Ocean, said NASA TV.

At 37, the astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, the European Space Agency, is the first Italian woman to travel in space. The three newcomers will live aboard the ISS until mid-May 2015. They will join the other three astronauts already there, the American Barry Wilmore and Russians Alexander Samokoutiaïev and Elena Serova, who themselves will come back to . March on Earth

Caviar, citrus and strong coffee

Their journey will be placed under the sign of a Gourmet renewal on the International Space Station: the astronauts take their luggage nearly half a kilo of caviar, told the Russian news agency TASS Agoureïev Alexander, one of the ISS managers. “There will be in the Soyuz 15 boxes of 30 grams of caviar, as well as apples, oranges, lemons, tomatoes and 140 portions of dry milk and black tea without sugar,” he explained, adding it is the wishes of the astronauts for their meal New Year.

The Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti also carries with her “the ISSpresso” , machine Coffee twenty pounds, whose creators have had to deal in particular with the principles of physics and fluid mechanics, very different in space and on Earth. This capsule espresso machine “alien” is the result of collaboration between Argotec , an Italian engineering company specializing in the design of aircraft systems and the preparation of food supplies in space, and Lavazza , an Italian coffee brand.

A total of sixteen countries participating in the ISS, including Russia and the United States, which finance the bulk . A crew of six astronauts continuously occupied structure with rotations of up to six months. Put into orbit in 1998, this outpost and space laboratory construction which cost a total of one hundred billion dollars, saw his long life of four years in January by NASA, until 2024. NASA depends Fully Russia to send its astronauts to the ISS, to $ 70 million headquarters in Soyuz rockets .