WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) – Russia launched two cosmonauts and an American astronaut to the International Space Station on Tuesday from Kazakhstan, resuming crewed flights from a recently repaired launchpad with a rare joint attendance by the heads of NASA and Russia’s space agency.
U.S. astronaut Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT), bound for the ISS, where they will spend about eight months as the station’s 75th rotation crew.
The crew and their Soyuz spacecraft were placed into orbit some 10 minutes later, beginning a roughly three-hour orbital trek to the football field-sized space laboratory ahead of docking at 1:56 p.m. EDT.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman traveled to Baikonur for meetings with Roscosmos director Dmitry Bakanov and to watch the launch, the first visit to Russia’s launch pad by a NASA chief since 2018. Tensions over the Russia-Ukraine war had largely prevented Bill Nelson, former President Joe Biden’s NASA chief, from such talks.
The Expedition 75 mission was the first spaceflight for Menon, 49. Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut, flew on a SpaceX capsule in 2024 with Menon’s wife, SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, and two others in the Polaris Dawn mission, a private spacewalking voyage funded by Isaacman.
The last time Russia launched a crew out of Baikonur Cosmodrome’s Site 31, the rocket badly damaged the historic launchpad, knocking Moscow’s only crew-capable launch site out of service amid months of repairs. Russia resumed launches from the pad in March with an uncrewed ISS cargo mission.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Sanjeev Miglani)
