The 1,794th flight of a Soyuz launch vehicle was performed on Tuesday, 23 October 2012 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 14:...
The 1,794th flight of a Soyuz launch vehicle was performed on Tuesday, 23 October 2012 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 14:51 Moscow time (12:51 Paris time).
Arianespace and its Russian partners report that the Soyuz TMA-06M manned transport spacecraft was accurately placed on the target orbit for another mission to the International Space Station. This was the tenth Soyuz family mission in 2012.
With the introduction of Soyuz at the Guiana Space Center (CSG) and its successful historic launch on 21 October 2011, this famed Russian medium-class launch vehicle became an integral part of the European launch vehicle fleet, together with the heavy-lift Ariane 5 and the lightweight Vega.
Offered to the commercial market, the Soyuz in French Guiana is Europe's reference medium-class launch vehicle for governmental and commercial missions.
Soyuz rocket launched an American astronaut, two Russian cosmonauts and 32 small fish into orbit Tuesday (Oct. 23), kicking off a five-month mission to the International Space Station for the human and aquatic explorers.
Riding aboard the rocket's Soyuz TMA-06M space capsule are NASA astronaut Kevin Ford and Russian cosmonaut s Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin. The three men are due to dock at the station on Thursday (Oct. 25) at 8:35 a.m. EDT (1235 GMT), and join three other crewmates already aboard the orbiting lab. Novitskiy is commanding the Soyuz flight.
The new U.S.-Russian crew will join NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, who have been living on the station since July. Williams is commanding the station's Expedition 33 crew.
