Only a few minutes remain before the launch of the Soyuz 2.1 launch vehicle into space. It will put the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft with three crew members on board into orbit. You can follow the flight of the two Roscosmos cosmonauts and Nasa astronaut Jonathan Kim from launch site No. 31 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome online here.
For Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexei Zubritsky, this will be his first space flight. Dmitry Bakanov, head of Roscosmos, asked the ship's commander Sergei Ryzhikov to look after his colleague and even crossed the crew.
Early in the morning of April 8, Sergei Ryzhikov, Alexei Zubritsky and Johnny Kim boarded the spacecraft to greet relatives and guests of the cosmodrome in the spirit of Yuri Gagarin. Today it is crowded at Baikonur. A record number of tourists arrived to see the crew off to the ISS - more than 2,500 people.
The video shows one of the mandatory rituals before the flight: when the crew goes up the stairs to the elevator, the accompanying person must gently push the cosmonaut, as Sergei Korolev did with Yuri Gagarin.
The flight to the ISS will last 3 hours 17 minutes. During this time, the Soyuz MS-27 manned spacecraft will make two orbits around the Earth, gradually moving from the launch orbit to the ISS orbit. The ship's crew will spend 245 days in space.
Read more on the topic:
It became known who will fly to the ISS tomorrow from Baikonur
The Soyuz-2.1a rocket with the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft are assembled and ready for launch to the ISS
