The Russian space agency Roscosmos and NASA have distributed live footage of the launch from Kazakhstan.
NASA’s Frank Rubio and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin were in the crew launched from Russia’s chartered Baikonur Cosmodrome at 1354 GMT.
Rubio is the first US astronaut to travel to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz rocket since President Vladimir Putin sent troops to pro-Western Ukraine on February 24.
In response, Western capitals, including Washington, have hit Moscow with unprecedented sanctions and bilateral relations have collapsed to a minimum.
Outer space remains an outlier for cooperation between the two countries. Russia’s only active female cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, is expected to reach the orbital station in early October aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon.
She will be the fifth professional cosmonaut from Russia or the Soviet Union to fly into space and the first Russian to fly the SpaceX spacecraft, the company of billionaire Elon Musk.
Russian cosmonauts and Western astronauts have tried to avoid the conflicts that rage on Earth, especially when they are in orbit together.
A collaboration between the United States, Canada, Japan, the European Space Agency and Russia, the ISS is divided into two parts: the US orbital segment and the Russian orbital segment. AFP PHOTOS / Natalia Kolesnikova
(WWD)
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