American NASA astronaut, Steven Swanson, and two Russian cosmonauts, Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev, were supposed to dock at the International Space Station two days ago but the capsule was unable to fire its manoeuvring engines as planned, which forced a delay in the docking.
The arrival of the trio returns the station to a full six-member crew.
A NASA spokesman called it a “flawless approach, a flawless docking,” after the crew’s Russian Soyuz spacecraft hooked up to the station’s Pirs docking module at 7:53 pm EST (23.53 GMT), five minutes ahead of schedule.
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Russian cosmonauts Skvortsov and Artemyev and NASA astronaut Swanson blasted off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket two days ago from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
They had expected to reach the station, a $100 billion research complex that flies about 400km above Earth, six hours later.
But about two hours after launch, the crew’s Soyuz capsule failed to fire its manoeuvring engines as planned, forcing a delay to the next station docking opportunity on Thursday.
The cause of the skipped rocket firing remains under investigation, said NASA mission commentator Rob Navias.
The arrival of the three men returns the station to a full six-member crew. The orbital outpost, a project of 15 nations, has been short-staffed since two other cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut returned to Earth on March 11th.
The 15-nation space station partnership, overseen by the United States and Russia, so far has been immunized from the political and economic fallout following Russia's invasion of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula.
Since retiring its fleet of space shuttles in 2011, the United States is dependent on Russia to fly its astronauts to the station, a service that costs NASA more than $63 million (€46 million) per person.
Reuters