Soyuz Rocket Launch To Unite U.S. And Russian Scientists In Space

Security personnel keep watch over the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft as it leaves its assemblage hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 18.

The March 21 launch will send U.S. astronaut Tracy Dyson, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, and Belarusian Marina Vasilevskaya to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the Soyuz spacecraft.


 

Roskosmos, the state corporation responsible for managing Russia's space program, announced both it and NASA will continue launches with each other's crew members through at least 2025 "to maintain the reliability of the ISS as a whole," according to multiple reports.

The world's largest spaceport is reeling from Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, plunging relations with the West to a new low. Competition from the U.S. firm SpaceX, which offers cheap and reliable launches to the ISS, is also challenging the monopoly held by Roskosmos.

 

For nearly seven decades, the sprawling complex located on the barren steppe of southern Kazakhstan has hosted hundreds of rockets and ballistic missiles that were hurled into space, playing a part in some of history's greatest spaceflight achievements: Sputnik, the world's first satellite; and the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin.

The ISS, launched in 1998 involving the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and participating countries of the European Space Agency, is one of the most complex international collaborations ever attempted and came at a time of increased cooperation following the Cold War.

People take pictures of the rocket as it is prepared for launch.

Kazakhstan, which has a long and complex relationship with Russia, is building relationships with countries, particularly those in the European Union, to diversify its economic and political ties.

Roskosmos, which pays Kazakhstan around $115 million annually to lease the complex, has been in a contract dispute with a partner Kazakh company over a proposed multibillion-dollar launch facility called Zenit-M.

Since Russia committed soldiers to Ukraine, the space industry -- including its so-called cross-flights, which carry crews of different nationalities on one spacecraft -- remains one of the few areas of unusual cooperation between Moscow and Washington.

Russia said it plans to use the station until 2028, after an earlier announcement to quit the orbiting laboratory.