Soyuz spacecraft docks at ISS despite technical fault

A Russian Soyuz rocket has safely delivered a US-Russian trio to the International Space Station, despite a technical glitch which briefly threatened to lengthen their journey.

The Soyuz blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday night to take Russian Alexander Samokutyaev, his compatriot Elena Serova and US astronaut Barry Wilmore into orbit.

Shortly after all stages of the booster were shed and the spaceship reached its designated orbit en route to the ISS, Russian media reported that one of the Soyuz's two solar arrays had failed to deploy.

Quoting space industry sources, the reports said that the batteries of the Soyuz had enough energy for docking, although the crew could still be forced to take a longer, two-day journey to the station instead of the originally planned six hours.

The spaceship finally safely docked at the 15-nation space station in automatic mode and on time, at about 0215 UTC.

The incoming crew will join Russian Commander Maxim Suraev, US Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman and German astronaut Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst, to return the station to its full, six-member live-aboard team.

Suraev's crew, which has manned the space station since May, is set to return to Earth in November. The incoming crew will serve 170 days until landing in March.

The 15-nation laboratory, which orbits at an altitude of about 420 kilometers (260 miles), is overseen by Russia and the United States.

In May, amid tensions over Ukraine and Crimea, a senior Russian government official cast doubt on the long-term future of the ISS, saying Moscow would reject a US request to prolong the orbiting station's use beyond 2020. The ISS's first component was launched in 1998.

First woman cosmonaut aboard the ISS

Elena Serova, a 38-year-old space industry engineer, will be the first Russian woman to work aboard the ISS. Serova was also only the fourth Russian woman in history to be sent into space.

Her predecessor, Elena Kondakova, made her second - and last - flight to the Russian space station Mir in 1997 as part of a NASA space shuttle crew. Mir, launched by the Soviet Union in 1986, operated until 2001.

Serova, after seven years of hard training as a cosmonaut, said in an interview that she had long dreamed about proving that Russian women are able to return to space flights.

Since the retirement of the US space shuttle fleet in 2011, Russian Soyuz spacecraft have served as the only means to ferry crew to and from the space outpost. Earlier this month, NASA made a major step toward ending its expensive dependence on Russian spacecraft, picking Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to the station in the next few years.

The California-based SpaceX, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has indicated it will cost about $20 million (15.7 million euros) apiece to send astronauts into space. That's less than a third of the cost of sending them with Soyuz rockets.

NASA has set a goal of 2017 for the first launch from Cape Canaveral. SpaceX is already using its unmanned Dragon capsule to deliver supplies to the space station, and is developing its manned version.

crh/nm (Reuters, AP)  dw de