The super-international crew went on a space trip from the Baikonur cosmodrome. The cosmonaut team consists of Russian Oleg Kononenko, Canadian David Saint-Jacques and American Ann McClain. Our astronaut flies into space for the fourth time. He will be a foreign astronaut instructor and mentor.
As noted in the Mission Control Center, all the stages were successfully separated from the launch vehicle, and the crew in the spacecraft headed for the orbital station. The start of the flight passed without incident.
Total space trip will last for the participants of the flight for more than six months. During this time, the astronaut and astronauts will conduct more than fifty scientific experiments. At the end of the year, our cosmonauts, Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev, are expected to leave the space station in open space.
Recall that from Baikonur they did not fly into space since October 11, when the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle crashed, having flown only a few seconds. She was supposed to deliver to the international space station Alexey Ovchinin (Russia) and Nika Haig (USA). The accident puzzled Russian designers and seriously slowed down the flight schedule to space. Nothing like this with the "Unions" did not occur for 35 years. Fortunately, the rescue capsule worked in the normal mode. The astronauts managed to successfully evacuate and land successfully.
As it was reported, after the investigation of the incident by a special commission of the commission, the accident occurred due to the malfunctioning of the sensor of separation of the first and second stages. The current launch was originally scheduled for the 20th of December, but after the accident, it was decided to hold it a little earlier.
