Their relationship on Earth may be at its lowest ebb in decades, but the U.S. and Russia haven't allowed their disagreements over Ukraine get in the way of their joint mission in space.
The arriving trio will be greeted by Japan's Koichi Wakata, NASA's Rick Mastracchio and Russia's Mikhail Tyurin, who have been at the station since November. Wakata is the first Japanese astronaut to lead the station. seen here: Polar Satellite
Dr S K Shivakumar, Director, ISRO's Satellite Centre (ISAC), Bengaluru, where the orbiter was assembled, summed up the mood of his colleagues on the eve of the big leap forward: “Our confidence levels are quite high. We do not need to worry about
Earlier this month, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden repeatedly said the conflict in Ukraine would have no effect on what's going on in space between the U.S. and Russia, saying that the "partnership in space remains intact and normal."
The U.S. pays Russia nearly $71 million per seat to fly astronauts to the space lab through 2017. It's doing that at a time when it has led calls for sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine following a hastily-arranged
So far, the tensions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine have been kept at bay. Since the retirement of the U.S. shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft as the only means to ferry crew to the orbiting outpost and back.
Swanson is a veteran of two U.S. space shuttle missions, and Skvortsov spent six months at the space outpost in 2010. Artemyev is on his first flight to space.
The Soyuz booster rocket lifted off as scheduled at 3.17 am, lighting up the night skies over the steppe with a giant fiery tail. It entered a designated orbit in about 10 minutes after the launch. All onboard systems were working flawlessly, and
The crew — NASA astronaut Steve Swanson and Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev — are set to dock the Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft at the station less than six hours after the launch and are scheduled to stay in orbit for six months.
In the early hours of Wednesday, March 26, a rocket carrying a Russian-American crew to the International Space Station blasted off successfully from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.