Soyuz TMA-17 blasting off

Live NASA TV retransmitted with French commentary on Enjoy Space.

The 3 astronauts aboard the Soyuz TMA-17 (left to right): American T.J. Creamer, Russian Oleg Kotov and Japanese Soichi Noguchi.
Credit: NASA/Victor Zelentsov

Update: launch successful. EnjoySpaceTV replay down below.

Today, 20 December, the Russian Soyuz TMA-17 spaceship is to blast off from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on its way to the International Space Station where it will dock two days later.
The 3 astronauts aboard the TMA-17 (see photograph below) will therefore join American Jeffrey Williams and Russian Maxim Suraev who are already on board the orbital complex. The ISS’ Expedition 22 will then total 5 crew members.

Expedition 22 on the NASA website

Publié le 20 décembre 2009

ALL THE LATEST NEWS

Soyuz in Guiana

This is the mythical rocket par excellence, the one that launched Sputnik, the first satellite and Gagarin, the first man in space. The CSG, Guiana Space Centre, is now one of its launch bases: a historic achievement.
Star Trek and NASA

The first episode of this famous science-fiction series was broadcast in September 1966. NASA has often made references to these programmes, as in the case of the space shuttle Enterprise, which had the same name as the spaceship in the series.
Alan Shepard, from suborbital to the Moon

50 years ago on 5 May 1961, a few weeks after Gagarin, American Alan Shepard reached space. Several years later, he was to walk on the Moon, summarising as it were the race in which the Soviet Union and the United States were competing.