Russia set to resume Soyuz flight

13 November 2011 Last updated at 20:08 ET

A Russian spacecraft carrying three astronauts - two Russians and one American - is due to launch shortly (0414 GMT) from Kazakhstan.

They are the first to travel on a Russian Soyuz craft since a similar unmanned rocket carrying cargo crashed shortly after launch in August.

All manned space travel was suspended after that crash for almost three months.

But the astronauts say they are confident that their craft is safe.

The American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are on their way to replace the current crew on the orbiting International Space Station.

'Faith'

The BBC's Daniel Sandford in Moscow says this has historically been a relatively safe way of getting into space.

But on 24 August, a similar Russian-built Soyuz rocket taking supplies to the space station crashed soon after launch.

That led to the human space flight programme being suspended until now.

But in their final comments to the media before the launch, the three men insisted they were confident in the technology and had no concerns.

For veteran Nasa astronaut Dan Burbank, 50, it is his first voyage on board a Soyuz spacecraft, while cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin, 42, and Anton Shkaplerov, 39, are making their maiden space voyage.

"We don't have any black thoughts. We have faith in our equipment," Anton Shkaplerov told journalists at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

After a two-day journey aboard the Soyuz capsule, the crew will dock with the space station, overlapping briefly with station commander Mike Fossum of Nasa, Japan's Satoshi Furukawa and Russia's Sergei Volkov.

The launch will be the first since the American space agency Nasa ended its 30-year shuttle programme in July, heralding a gap of several years when the 16 nations investing in the $100bn International Space Station will rely solely on Russia to ferry crews.

Any problem with the launch could leave the space station empty for the first time in more than a decade when the current three-man crew returns to Earth later this month.

Russia's space agency chief said the August rocket failure was an "isolated" glitch caused by a fuel pipe blockage.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/world-europe-15715260

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