3 Astronauts Set to Launch to Space Station

Washington: Three space travelers, including two astronauts on their first flight, are scheduled to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) today for a six-and-a-half month mission, NASA said. The launch comes less than two months after a booster failure forced a Soyuz spacecraft carrying Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague to make an emergency landing. The incident became the first failure of a manned space launch in modern Russian history. The three new space travelers — Anne McClain of NASA, David Saint-Jacquesof the Canadian Space Agency and Oleg Kononenko of Russian space agency Roscosmos–are preparing to launch aboard the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft at 5.31 p.m. from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. (IANS)