A relatively inexperienced crew of two astronauts and a cosmonaut blasted off Wednesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a five-month mission on the International Space Station. German Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, NASA's Serena Aunon-Chancellor and Russian Sergei Prokopyev of Roscosmos shot into the sky in warm, dry conditions at 1112 GMT.
They should dock at the space station on Friday. The trio only have a total of one previous space mission between them - 42-year-old Gerst's debut mission aboard the ISS was in 2014 - making this one of the less experienced space station crews in recent times. Prokopyev, 43, will serve as the crew's flight commander for the two-day journey to the orbital lab despite having never flown into space before.
Aunon-Chancellor, 42, who followed her father into engineering before training to be an astronaut and is also a practising doctor, was only confirmed by NASA for the mission at the beginning of the year. The rookie's late inclusion into the mission came at the expense of Jeanette Epps, who would have been the first African-American to serve on a long-term mission aboard the space station had she flown as expected.