MOSCOW (AP) â€" A Soyuz spacecraft safely delivered a Russian, an American and a Dutchman to the International Space Station on Friday, restoring a permanent organisation to 6 members for a initial time given September.
But only as concerns over a trustworthiness of a Soyuz have eased, a opposite chronicle of a Soyuz rocket unsuccessful Friday during an unmanned launch. It was a latest in a fibre of fantastic launch failures that have lifted questions about a state of Russia's space industry.
The qualification carrying goal commander Oleg Kononenko, NASA's Don Pettit and European Space Agency wanderer Andre Kuipers had trafficked by space for dual days after blustering off from Baikonur, a Russian-operated cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The boat docked during a orbiting hire during 5:19 p.m. (1319GMT) Friday.
About dual and half hours later, a 3 new organisation members floated by an non-stop induce to join NASA's Dan Burbank and Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, who had arrived on a hire in November.
"I can't consider of a prettier design than observant all 6 behind on house a space station," NASA's William Gerstenmaier told a fabricated organisation during a video linkup with Russian Mission Control outward Moscow.
Families of organisation members, who had assimilated space officials to watch a docking, also sent their greetings, with Kuipers' immature child singing him a strain in Dutch.
The 6 organisation members will work together on a International Space Station until mid-March.
The unsuccessful launch of an unmanned Progress load boat in Aug had lifted doubts about destiny missions to a station, since a Soyuz rocket that crashed used a same top theatre as a upholder rockets carrying Soyuz ships to orbit.
The subsequent manned launch was behind until Russian space officials could establish a means of a Progress disaster and it went off but a join in November. The organisation on that goal overlapped for 8 days with a 3 organisation members remaining on a station, who afterwards returned to Earth after that month.
However, on Friday, a newer chronicle of a Soyuz unsuccessful to put a Meridian communications satellite into circuit when launched from Russia's Plesetsk cosmodrome. Space group conduct Vladimir Popovkin pronounced a means was engine failure.
"What happened currently was a rarely upsetting situation," Popovkin was quoted by state news agencies as saying. "It confirms that a (aerospace) attention is in predicament and a weakest couple is engine building."
The failures Friday and during a Progress launch in Aug both took place during a third stage. The Soyuz-2.1b that crashed Friday, however, has a opposite third-stage engine, a ITAR-Tass news group said.
Friday's unsuccessful launch was a sixth in a past year.
Last December, Russia mislaid 3 navigation satellites when a rocket carrying them unsuccessful to strech orbit. A troops satellite was mislaid in February, and a launch of a Express-AM4, described by officials as Russia's many absolute telecommunications satellite, went badly in August.
In November, Russia sent adult a desirous Phobos-Ground unmanned probe, that was to go to a Phobos moon of Mars, take dirt samples and lapse them to Earth. But engineers mislaid hit with a boat and were incompetent to propel it out of Earth circuit and toward Mars. The qualification is now approaching to tumble to Earth in mid-January.
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