BAIKONUR (Kazakhstan) (Sputnik) — A Russian Soyuz-FG carrier rocket with the Soyuz MS-06 manned spacecraft lifted off on Wednesday from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan to deliver the crew of Expedition 53/54 to the International Space Station (ISS), a Sputnik correspondent reported.
The manned spacecraft then separated from the launch vehicle.
The members of the crew are Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) cosmonaut Aleksandr Misurkin and NASA astronauts Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei.
The program of the team's mission at the ISS will include over a dozen scientific experiments in medicine, biology, biotechnology and geophysics, which mostly cannot be replicated on the Earth.
A spacewalk, aimed at improving communications in the Russian segment of the ISS, is also part of the program.
