successful takeoff. Three astronauts, including a woman, boarded the night of Wednesday to Thursday 7 in Baikonur (Kazakhstan) on board a Soyuz brand new towards the International Space Station (ISS). After a journey of several days, they join Jeff Williams of NASA (head of the ISS) and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinine.
The long-awaited launch was delayed by more than two weeks because of a last series of checks. The Russian ship, completely renovated, is now equipped with a new navigation system, stronger protections and more numerous cells on solar panels.
The unit should now take two days to reach destination. On site, Kate Rubins, who is the first woman to join the ISS since Samantha Cristoforetti will be the first to sequence DNA in space. She will be joined by astronaut Takuya Onishi (11th Japanese to travel in space) and cosmonaut Anatoli Ivanishin who has already spent 165 days on the ISS in 2011 and 2012. In all, they will spend four months.
A total of 16 countries participate in the ISS including Russia and the US, which finance most. The International Space Station, which is the largest man-made objects have been placed in Earth orbit (1998), saw his long life of four years in January 2015 by NASA, until 2024. Its construction cost a total of one hundred billion dollars.
(see below the Soyuz launch to the ISS video)
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