A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts blasted off en route to the International Space Station, two days after its launch was aborted seconds before takeoff. The spacecraft carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus, and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson took off from Russia’s Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan in the late afternoon on March 23. The capsule will take two days to reach the orbiting station. The launch was originally scheduled for March 21, but was halted when an automatic safety system was tripped about 20 seconds before liftoff. The station is one of the only remaining avenues of cooperation between Washington and Moscow as tensions have plummeted over Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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