Russian cosmonauts launched on flight to International Space Station

March 18 (Reuters) – Three Russian cosmonauts were launched on Friday on the way to the International Space Station (ISS) to continue a two-decade-plus shared Russian-U.S. presence aboard the orbiting outpost despite tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Soyuz spacecraft carrying the new cosmonaut team lifted off at about 1555 GMT (11:55 a.m. Eastern time) from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin a three-hour-plus ride to the space station.

Soyuz commander Oleg Artemyev led the team, joined by two spaceflight rookies, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, on a science mission set to last 6-1/2 months. The launch was carried live by NASA TV and on the U.S. space agency’s website.

About 2-1/2 hours into the flight, the Soyuz became visible from the space station as a tiny black dot gradually growing larger as it came closer, the NASA webcast showed.

The three cosmonauts will join the station’s current seven-member crew to replace three who are scheduled to fly back to Earth on March 30 – cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and U.S. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.

Vande Hei will have logged a NASA record-breaking 355 days in orbit by the time he returns to Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz capsule with his two cosmonaut peers.

Remaining aboard the ISS with the newcomers until the next rotation a couple months later are three NASA astronauts – Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron – and German crewmate Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency.

Those four crew members arrived together in November aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-month stint in orbit.

Launched in 1998, the research platform orbiting some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth has been continuously occupied since November 2000 while operated by a U.S.-Russian-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

COLLABORATION TESTED

The latest change in ISS personnel comes as the durability of longstanding U.S.-Russian collaboration in space is tested by heightened antagonism between the two former Cold War adversaries over Russia’s invasion last month of Ukraine.

As part of U.S. economic sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government last month, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered high-tech export restrictions against Moscow that he said were designed to “degrade” Russia’s aerospace industry, including its space program.

Dmitry Rogozin, director-general of Russian space agency Roscosmos, then lashed out in a series of tweets suggesting the U.S. sanctions could “destroy” ISS teamwork and lead to the space station itself falling out of orbit. read more

A week later, Rogozin retaliated by announcing Russia would stop supplying or servicing Russian-made rocket engines used by two U.S. aerospace NASA suppliers, suggesting U.S. astronauts could use “broomsticks” to get to orbit. read more

At about the same time, Russia said it ceased joint ISS research with Germany and forced the 11th-hour cancellation of a British satellite launch from Baikonur. read more

The Roscosmos chief also said last month that Russia was suspending its cooperation with European launch operations at the European Spaceport in French Guiana. read more

The space station itself was born in part from a foreign policy initiative to improve American-Russian relations following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War hostility that spurred the original U.S.-Soviet space race.

Rogozin’s recent actions have prompted some in the U.S. space industry to rethink the NASA-Roscosmos partnership.

Ann Kapusta, executive director of nonprofit space advocacy group the Space Frontier Foundation, told Reuters in a recent statement that the United States should end its ISS collaboration with Russia.

Kapusta, a onetime ISS research operations lead for NASA, said “toxic behavior” by Rogozin “shows there is no distance between Roscosmos and Putin’s war machine,” and that Russia can no longer be trusted to safely cooperate in space.

NASA officials, for their part, have said that U.S. and Russian ISS crew members, while aware of events on Earth, were still working together professionally and that geopolitical tensions had not infected the space station.

Addressing the U.S. space agency’s 60,000 employees in a video “town hall” on Monday, NASA chief Bill Nelson said: “NASA continues working with all our international partners, including State Space Corporation Roscosmos, for the ongoing safe operations” of the space station.

Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by Will Dunham and Jason Neely

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