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An American and two Russians go together to the International Space Station

2023-09-15 22:57:53, Kosova & Bota CNA

An American and two Russians flew to the International Space Station on Friday in a Russian spacecraft.

NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara and two Roskosmos cosmonauts, Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and landed on the space station after a three-hour flight.

O'Hara will spend six months there, while Kononenko and Chub will stay for a year.

The trio was supposed to fly to the space station last spring, but their cabin was needed as a replacement for another crew. That crew — also made up of two Russians and an American — will return home later this month.

Their stay on the space station was extended from six months to a year when the cabin of the Soyuz spacecraft suffered a leak in the cooling mechanism while it was parked on the station.

This is the first space flight for O'Haran and Chub, while for the mission commander, Kononenko, this is the fifth flight.

They join seven station residents from the United States, Russia, Denmark and Japan.

At the end of his one-year stay, Kononenko will set a new record for the longest time spent in space, more than a thousand days.

Washington and Moscow have maintained space cooperation, although relations hit their lowest point in decades due to the war in Ukraine, with astronauts staying together on the International Space Station as well as flying together.

Under an agreement signed last year as part of the International Space Station flight program, three Russian cosmonauts will fly on the United States' Dragon spacecraft and three American astronauts on the Russian Soyuz MS spacecraft during the 2022s. -2024.

Russia has said it will give up the International Space Station and establish its own independent space station in the future, although plans for how and when that will happen are still being discussed.

Russia's space program suffered a setback last month when the unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft crashed while attempting to land on the moon's south pole, three days before India successfully launched its Chandrayaan spacecraft. -3./ REL