(Moscow) The Soyuz spacecraft which took off two days ago with the first Belarusian cosmonaut in history on board, Marina Vassilevskaya, docked on Monday with the International Space Station (ISS), the space agency announced Russian Roscosmos on Telegram.
The Soyuz MS-25 crew consists of American astronaut Tracy Dyson, experienced Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky and 33-year-old Marina Vassilevskaya.
Tracy Dyson will spend 184 days in orbit, while her colleagues will return to Earth on April 6, after 14 days in space, Roscosmos said.
The spacecraft took off on Saturday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, after a first test canceled at the very last moment earlier in the week.
This postponement, announced when the rocket was already on the launch pad, was seen as a new setback for the Russian space sector, which has been struggling for years due to financing problems, embarrassing failures and scandals. of corruption.
Three Russian space vehicles docked on the Russian segment of the ISS have experienced coolant leaks in recent months. In August, the first Russian probe sent to the Moon from the USSR crashed on the lunar surface.
The Russian space sector is also limited by its lack of innovation, with most of its systems relying on generally reliable, but aging, Soviet technologies.
After the end of the American shuttle program in 2011, Soyuz rockets had the exclusive right to manned flights to the ISS. A monopoly, lucrative for Roscosmos, which nevertheless ended in 2020 with the arrival of the private company SpaceX of billionaire Elon Musk.
Russian-Western cooperation in the space field has also been weighed down by the Russian offensive against Ukraine and the sanctions that followed. The ISS constitutes one of the rare areas of cooperation still in progress between Moscow and Washington.
But Russia wants to end its participation in the ISS after 2024 to concentrate on building its own space station.