A Russian spacecraft carrying two Russians and an American docked at the International Space Station on Friday after blasting off from Kazakhstan.
NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub departed from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and docked at the ISS approximately three hours later.
The Soyuz MS-24 rocket is launched with Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on September 15, 2023 in Kazakhstan. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images)
Per NASA, the trio will join the station’s Expedition 69 crew comprising astronauts from the U.S., Russia, Denmark, and Japan. O’Hara will spend six months there while Kononenko and Chub will spend a year.
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The trio was supposed to fly to the space station earlier this year, but their original capsule, Soyuz MS-23, was needed as a replacement for another crew. That crew — also two Russians and an American — will ride it home on September 27. Their stay was extended from six months to a year when the capsule developed a coolant leak while parked at the station.
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It’s the first spaceflight for O’Hara and Chub, while mission commander Kononenko is on his fifth trip to the orbiting outpost. By the end of his yearlong stay, Kononenko will set a new record for the longest time in space, more than a thousand days.
