A Russian, an American and a Canadian astronaut have taken off for the international space station in the first manned launch of a Soyuz rocket since a harrowing crash in October.
Monday’s launch of the MS-11 ship was a closely watched test for Russia’s space industry, which has suffered several high-profile failures in recent years but remains the only reliable way to deliver crew to the orbiting station.
A source of national pride for both the Soviet Union and Russia under Vladimir Putin, missions into the cosmos are virtually the only area of cooperation left between Russia and the United States after the Ukraine crisis.
Space station veteran and mission commander Oleg Kononenko, 54, Quebec family doctor David Saint-Jacques, 48, and Anne McClain, 39, a US army helicopter pilot who earned masters degrees from the University of Bath and Bristol in the UK, lifted off in a cloud of flame and smoke from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome on Monday afternoon.
In the course of an eight-minute flight through the atmosphere, the craft first jettisoned its boosters and then its second stage rocket to successfully deliver the spacecraft into orbit.
The trio were scheduled to dock with the space station six hours later to relieve the current crew, which will return home on December 20.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to launch from Cape Canaveral a long-delayed reusable Falcon 9 rocket with 5,600 pounds of research equipment and supplies including holiday food for the space station.
The MS-11 mission was moved up after the same kind of Soyuz spacecraft and FG rocket booster crashed at Baikonur in October, risking the lives of Russian commander Alexei Ovchinin and Nasa astronaut Nick Hague.
One of the four boosters caught on the second stage as they detached, sending the rocket careening toward the ground a little more than two minutes after takeoff. The capsule automatically aborted the mission and parachuted the two men to safety about 250 miles away on the plains of Kazakhstan.
Russia blamed the crash on a sensor in the booster separation system that was damaged during installation in what the space agency head could have been an act of sabotage. Having taken apart two rockets during an investigation, its specialists have now fixed the problem, a special commission said.
Arianespace launched a European weather satellite into orbit on an unmanned Soyuz rocket last month.
Monday’s mission follows a scare at the space station in August when a drop in pressure was traced to a small hole in a panel in a Soyuz MS-09 module, which had docked with the station in June.
Russia’s space czar at one point suggested the hole could have been drilled by the German or American crew member on the station.
MS-11 crew member Anne McClain said she had absolute confidence in the Soyuz despite the crash, telling CBS News she “would have gotten on a rocket the day after that happened”.
But crashes of unmanned Russian spacecraft in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 have called into doubt the viability of the country’s space industry, where low wages have reportedly hurt operations. In the most egregious incident, an unmanned Soyuz rocket carrying 19 international satellites crashed in November 2017 after it was programmed with the coordinates for the wrong launch site.
Monday’s mission started from the same launchpad that Yuri Gagarin did when he became the first man in space in 1961. Russian Orthodox priests flicked holy water on the rocket, launch team and assembled journalists during a blessing the day before.
On Friday, Russia launched three communications satellites into space and an unidentified fourth object that some think could be a new spy satellite.