Accessibility links

Breaking News

3-Person Crew Reaches International Space Station


The Soyuz MS spacecraft carrying the crew of Kate Rubins of the U.S., Anatoly Ivanishin of Russia and Takuya Onishi of Japan blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) from the launchpad at the Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, July 7, 2016. REUT
The Soyuz MS spacecraft carrying the crew of Kate Rubins of the U.S., Anatoly Ivanishin of Russia and Takuya Onishi of Japan blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) from the launchpad at the Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, July 7, 2016. REUT

A Soyuz space capsule carrying a three-person, multi-national crew docked with the International Space Station early Saturday, some 400 kilometers above the Earth.

NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins, Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi lifted off from Russia's space complex in Baikonaur, Kazakhstan Thursday.

The crew will spend four months in the orbiter.

Rubins is a cancer and infectious diseases researcher. She plans to attempt the first DNA sequencing in space.

They are joining American Jeff Williams and Russians Oleg Skropochka and Alexey Ovchinin.

NASA has been depending on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to travel to the ISS since the end of the Space Shuttle program five years ago. The U.S. space agency hopes to get back in the business of flying to the space station in 2018, using spacecraft developed by Boeing and privately owned SpaceX.

  • 16x9 Image

    VOA News

    The Voice of America provides news and information in more than 40 languages to an estimated weekly audience of over 326 million people. Stories with the VOA News byline are the work of multiple VOA journalists and may contain information from wire service reports.

XS
SM
MD
LG