A TRIO of Russian, Japanese and US astronauts blasted off aboard a Soyuz spaceship yesterday for a four-month mission on the International Space Station (ISS) that Moscow hopes will help restore confidence in its space programme.
Veteran Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, Nasa astronaut Sunita Williams and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide launched successfully aboard the Soyuz TMA-05M rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3.40am UK time.
They are scheduled to berth early on Tuesday, joining Nasa Flight Engineer Joseph Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin aboard the ISS, a £64 billion research complex orbiting 240 miles above Earth.
"The Soyuz had a very smooth ride into space," a spokesman for NASA said during a live broadcast on the agency's television channel. The rocket blazed a bright orange trail through cloudy skies above the Kazakh steppe.
Since the retirement of its shuttles last year, the US is dependent on Russia to fly astronauts to the ISS, which costs the nation $60 million (£40m) per person.
Moscow hopes a successful mission will help to restore confidence in its once-pioneering space programme after a string of launch mishaps last year, including the failure of a mission to return samples from the Martian moon Phobos.
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