MOSCOW (AP) — A trio of Russian cosmonauts arrived on the International Space Station on Friday, the first new faces in space since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, aboard the Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft at 8:55pm on Friday. They docked without problems with the station just three hours later, joining two other Russians, four Americans and one German there.
This is the first takeoff of a space crew since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
The war has led to the cancellation of space launches and contracts. The head of Roscosmos, Dimitri Rogozin, has warned that the United States would have to use “broomsticks” to fly into space after Russia said it would stop supplying rocket turbines to US companies. Many fear that Rogozin is jeopardizing a peaceful partnership of decades off the planet, especially on the Space Station.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson played down Rogozin's comments, telling The Associated Press that “this is Dimitri Rogozin. Sometimes it's a big mouth. But, at the end of the day, he is one of ours.”
“The other people working in the Russian civil space program are professionals,” Nelson said Friday. “They have no problem with us, the American astronauts or American mission control. Despite all that, there in space, we can have cooperation with our Russian friends, our Russian colleagues.”
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei — who broke the US record for a single flight with 340 days on Tuesday — will leave the station along with two Russians aboard a Soyuz capsule on March 30.
In April, three other NASA astronauts and one Italian astronauts must take off for the station.