Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov lifted off aboard a Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad in Kazakhstan at 11:55 a.m. ET. The crew’s launch and trip to the space station, which should take just over three hours, will be streamed live on NASA’s website.
It’s the first spaceflight for Matveev and Korsakov, and the trio will spend the next six and a half months aboard the space station.
The cosmonauts manually guided the Soyuz through docking with the space station and successfully docked at 3:12 p.m. ET. The hatch opened at 5:48 p.m. ET and they were welcomed aboard the ISS by two Russian cosmonauts, four NASA astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut. The crew were all smiles and embraced one another after floating through the hatch.
This brings the station’s crew count to 10.
Typically, Russian Soyuz launches include two…
