After a three-hour flight, a Soyuz capsule carrying two cosmonauts and an astronaut landed at the ISS on Friday. The spacecraft with the Russians Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and their American colleague Loral O’Hara took off from Kazakhstan.
The space capsule arrived at the International Space Station at 9:54 p.m. Moscow time (8:54 p.m. CEST), Russian news agency Interfax reported on Friday. The flight from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe to the ISS took just over three hours.
This is Kononenko’s fifth flight
According to the plan, O’Hara will stay in space for about six months, Kononenko and Tschub for about a year. Four exits to open space and four arrivals of cargo flights are planned during the expedition. The astronauts will also conduct numerous scientific experiments. This is Kononenko’s fifth flight. O’Hara and Tschub, on the other hand, are having their premiere.
Escape despite differences
Meanwhile, it became known that Russia is now ready to extend the agreement with the US on joint space flights to the International Space Station. Russia actually wanted to end the cooperation next year due to tensions after the attack on Ukraine. The space agency Roscosmos announced further flights on Friday. An additional agreement for the continuation of crossover flights for the years 2024 and 2025 is being prepared, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Yuri Borisov, said on Friday, according to the Interfax news agency.
The ISS is one of the few objects on which Americans and Russians are still working together after the outbreak of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Russia had now announced that it would end the cooperation after 2024 and set up its own orbital station.
Source: Krone
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