Russian cosmonauts to be launched this Friday to the Space Station

Three Russian cosmonauts are due to launch this Friday (18) to the International Space Station (ISS), continuing a shared Russian-American mission spanning more than two decades.

The presence of the two countries aboard the orbiting outpost continues despite growing ground tensions between Moscow and Washington.

The Soyuz spacecraft carrying the new team of cosmonauts was scheduled to take off at 15:55 GMT from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin a more than three-hour journey to the space station.

Soyuz commander Oleg Artemyev will lead the team, accompanied by two spaceflight novices, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, on a six-and-a-half-month science mission aboard the ISS.

They will join the station’s current seven-member crew to replace three that are scheduled to fly back to Earth on March 30 – cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.

Vande Hei will have recorded a NASA record of 355 days in orbit when he returns to Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz capsule with his two fellow cosmonauts.

Remaining aboard the ISS with the newcomers until the next rotation a few months later are three NASA astronauts – Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron – and German crewmate Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency.

These four crew members arrived together in November aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-month period in orbit.

Launched in 1998, the research platform, which orbits about 400 km above Earth, has been continuously occupied since November 2000, while operated by a US-Russia-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.