MOSCOW. April 9 (Interfax) - The crew of the Soyuz MS-18 manned spacecraft has boarded the International Space Station (ISS), as can be seen in a broadcast of the docking and transfer being aired by Roscosmos.
Once the air-tightness of the docking between the Soyuz and the ISS was verified and the transfer hatch opened, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei entered the station. They were met by Russian cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins.
The Soyuz-2.1a launch vehicle blasted off from Site 31 of Baikonur Cosmodrome at 10:42 a.m. Moscow Time. Travel time to the ISS was three hours and 22 minutes.
The expedition is due to last for 191 days. Expedition commander Novitsky will return to Earth in October, and the other two crewmembers, Vande Hei and Dubrov, will have a longer mission. The crew will perform two spacewalks to prepare for the arrival of the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module at the station in July. The flight program also includes about 50 scientific experiments.