After a delay that forced astronauts to take a longer-than-expected trip to the International Space Station, a three-man crew has arrived at the orbital outpost.
The approach to station went off exactly as planned, with no major delays or setbacks to the rendezvous. The two ships mated five minutes ahead of the revised schedule.
Aboard the Russian craft are two Russian cosmonauts, Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev, and Steve Swanson, an American astronaut. The trio lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, headed for a meeting six hours later with the space station. The attitude control system aboard the space capsule failed to maneuver the craft into the proper orbit at the correct time. A change of less than one degree delayed the mission by two days, after an engine firing needed to be aborted.
As originally planned, the mission would have taken astronauts around the world four times in six hours before meeting the space station. After failure to achieve the correct orbit, the crew had to orbit the Earth 34 times before they were able to dock with the ISS. Until a year ago, this was the normal path to the station, before NASA engineers found a way to take an "express route" to the orbital outpost. Only four missions have reached the space station so far using this shortcut.
Rick Mastracchio from the United States and Mikhail Tyurin of Russia were already aboard the station, along with Japan's Koichi Wakata.
"The sextet then gathered inside the Zvezda service module for a welcoming ceremony with words of congratulations from family members and mission officials. Afterward the crew got together for a safety briefing to familiarize themselves with the station's emergency gear, escape routes and team member roles," NASA wrote in a press release.
The arrival of the crew at the space station is happening as tensions rise between the United States and Russia over the crisis on Crimea. That peninsula has recently been annexed by Russian military forces. Tens of thousands of troops under the command of Vladimir Putin have recently been re-deployed to the border between Crimea and the Ukraine.
Conditions aboard the space station mean that crews must work together, regardless of political events on Earth. The subject of politics is not off the table as a topic of conversation for the space travelers. Current events are often a topic of conversation among the crews.
"Operations rendezvous and docking with the station were carried out in automatic mode under control of the crew and specialists Moscow Mission Control Center," the Russian space agency reported.
An unmanned re-supply mission utilizing a Dragon space capsule was due to launch on 30 March. That flight, managed by private space developer SpaceX, was delayed after the failure of a radar facility operated by the Air Force. Mission managers have not yet announced an updated launch date.
