Russia has successfully launched a manned spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday easing concerns about its space programme after several failures.
A Soyuz TMA-22 spaceship with two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut blasted off as scheduled at 8.14 a.m. local time from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It is due to dock with the ISS on Wednesday.
The mission had been delayed for two months following the crash of an unmanned Progress cargo ship in August due to engine failure in the third stage booster, which is the same as in the Soyuz spacecraft.
Russian space engineers are currently desperately struggling to rescue another space mission, a probe to the Martian moon Phobos, which got stuck in a support orbit around the Earth last week after engines failed to fire it off on its interplanetary voyage. It was the fifth problem in the launch of Russian rockets in a year.
Monday’s launch was the first manned flight to the ISS after the U.S. shut down its space shuttle programme, leaving Russia responsible for the maintenance and supply of the space station.
Veteran NASA astronaut Daniel Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin will replace the current ISS Russian-American-Japanese crew who will return to Earth on November 22, 2011. Crews rotate every six months.
The head of Russia's space agency Vladimir Popovkin said on Monday that experts are still trying to reprogramme the Phobos probe to direct it to Mars.
“There is a chance [of success], but we have still not obtained the telemetric information to understand what happened” after the launch, he said adding that efforts were hampered by too short communication sessions with the probe that last only seven minutes whereas ground control stations need more time to set up data exchange.
Mr. Popovkin said experts had till early December to fix the problem where after the travel window to Mars will close. If they fail to make the spaceship continue its journey, it will be pulled towards the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere in January, he said.
