Safe arrival

A Russian spacecraft carrying two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut has docked with the International Space Station ISS.

A spokesman for the Russian space agency said the Soyuz TMA-22 docked successfully on Wednesday at 0524 GMT. The flight to the ISS lasted some 49 hours.

Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin and American Dan Burbank have now joined the three crew currently on board the ISS. They will remain aboard the space station until March 2012.

Launch delay

The current crew – Japan's Satoshi Furukawa, Russia's Sergei Volkov and American Mike Fossum – will return to Earth on November 22. A new crew will be sent up next month, taking the station back to its normal six-person crew.

The spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan on Monday in the first manned launch since an unmanned Progress cargo ship headed for the ISS crashed shortly after its launch in August.

The failed launch caused space officials to postpone the present mission because of safety concerns, as the rocket involved had the same upper stage as the booster rockets on Soyuz ships. The delay caused the ISS crew numbers to be cut to three.

The Russian Soyuz is the only way of taking humans to the ISS after the United States retired its space shuttle in July of this year.

Series of failures

The Russian space program has seen a string of technical failures over the past 12 months. In addition to the Progress mishap, it has lost three navigation satellites, a military satellite and a telecommunications satellite because of faulty launches.

Another probe, the Phobos-Grunt, which was meant to fly to one of Mars's moons to collect a soil sample, did not make it out of Earth's orbit after its launch on November 9.

Russia's record on space travel safety is otherwise relatively good, with no fatalities since 1971, when the crew of Soyuz-11 died while returning to Earth.

Author: Timothy Jones (AFP, AP, dpa)
Editor: Andreas Illmer