ISS crew ready for planned launch on December 3
171 views · Published 19 November 2018 · 3:03 · Indexed 25 September 2026
Channel: AP Archive · 2018 · News & Politics
(14 Nov 2018) Crew members of Expedition 58 to the International Space Station (ISS) said on Wednesday they were ready for their planned launch on 3 December, despite recent setbacks with the space programme. A Soyuz-FG rocket launch aborted just two minutes after take-off on 11 October, sending an emergency capsule into a sharp fall back to Earth. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos' Alexei Ovchinin landed on a steppe in Kazakhstan safely in the accident, the first of its kind for Russia's manned programme in over three decades. Crew members of Expedition 58 have been taking part in training and exams at Russia's Star City on Wednesday ahead of their launch to the ISS. The launch on 3 December is earlier than expected, due to the October rocket failure. They will spend six months aboard the orbiting lab. Speaking to reporters, NASA Astronaut Anne C. McClain, said the crew was very focussed on the job in hand. Asked how relations between the US and Russia affected crew members, Roscosmos' Oleg Kononenko said he did not follow the political news much, adding relationships between crew members were "friendly, normal, working." "The people who work here in the space industry are quite pragmatic, (they) need to solve technical problems, and these problems are being solved," he said. For his part, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, said the incident on 11 October has made the crew concentrate on the importance of their training. The launch abort was the first in 35 years for Russia's human spaceflight programme and only the third one ever. An investigation has found that it was caused by a sensor that was damaged during assembly. And in September, a space station air leak was traced to a hole mysteriously drilled into a docked Soyuz capsule. Russian investigators are still working to understand how a rocket sensor ended up bent during manufacturing and how the hole wound up in the Soyuz. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/ You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/ebe7d6c478acb5e1dca104c917d202f4
