Russian Soyuz lifts off to space with 3 astronauts

Washington: A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts successfully lifted off to the International Space Station on Saturday.

The flight originally slated to fly on Thursday was aborted on the launch pad, due to a dead battery.

The soyuz MS-25 carrying NASA's Tracy C. Dyson, cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and Marina Vasilevskaya, a spaceflight participant from Belarus, launched to ISS from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 8:36 a.m. EDT (6:06 IST).

"Liftoff! Three Soyuz crew members, including Tracy C. Dyson, are headed to the @Space_Station," NASA said in a post on X.com on Saturday.

The Soyuz is expected to dock to the space station’s Prichal module at 11:09 a.m. on Monday (March 25), the US space agency said.

The trio will join Expedition 70 crew members including NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara, Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Alexander Grebenkin.

Dyson will spend six months aboard the ISS and return to Earth in September with Oleg Kononenko and Roscosmos' Nikolai Chub.

Chub will complete a year-long mission on the laboratory.

Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya will be on the orbiting lab for 12 days, and will return along with O’Hara on April 6. O’Hara will have spent 204 days in space when she returns.