A Russian spacecraft <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/2023/09/14/crew-to-replace-astronauts-stuck-in-space-for-a-year-will-launch-to-iss-on-friday/" target="_blank">blasted off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome</a> on Friday carrying two Russian cosmonauts and a US astronaut to join the crew of the International Space Station, live TV images showed. At 6.53pm GMT, the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft with American Loral O'Hara and Russians Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on board docked at the ISS, Russia's Roscosmos space agency said. They will join the current crew of Nasa astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/us-news/2023/09/12/nasa-astronaut-frank-rubio-breaks-us-record-for-longest-space-flight/" target="_blank">Frank Rubio</a>, Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin, Konstantin Borisov and Sergei Prokopyev, and Denmark's Andreas Mogensen and Japan's Satoshi Furukawa. Ms O'Hara and Mr Chub are on their first space flight, while Mr Kononenko is on his fifth. Russia's space programme suffered a major setback last month when its Luna-25 spacecraft crashed during an attempt to land near the south pole of the moon in the country's first lunar mission in 47 years. The ISS is one of the few international projects on which the US and Russia still co-operate closely. Relations in other areas have broken down since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to which Washington responded by arming Kyiv and imposing successive rounds of sanctions on Moscow.
