Two U.S. astronauts and a cosmonaut blasted off aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan on Wednesday for a two-day trip to the international space station.
The rocket took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome early Wednesday, marking the 100th flight to the orbital outpost, a $100 billion project of 16 nations that is nearing completion after more than a decade of construction 350 kilometers above Earth.
Riding inside the Soyuz capsule were cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, a former station commander returning for a second stint, NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock, a veteran shuttle astronaut, and first-time flier Shannon Walker, Houston's first hometown astronaut.
The trio will become part of the 24th live-aboard expedition crew headed by cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, who, along with cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko and NASA's Tracy Caldwell Dyson, were launched to the station April 2.
The arrival of Walker will mark the first time the station's live-aboard crew includes two women.
"I'm very happy and a little bit apprehensive," Walker, speaking in Russian, told reporters during a pre-launch news conference.
Walker's husband, four-time shuttle astronaut Andy Thomas, who served aboard the Russian Mir space station 12 years ago, was among the dozens of NASA officials, friends and relatives in Kazakhstan to bid the crew farewell. Thomas said he was "excited, thrilled, nervous and a tiny bit jealous."
Among Walker's personal items is a watch worn by Amelia Earhart during a pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Walker, a private pilot and member of the Ninety-Nines International Organization of Women Pilots, said in a statement that she hoped honoring Earhart might draw some new pilots into the field.
Like other launches from the Russian-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan, the crew's mission followed a time-tested routine.
After being meticulously fitted for their pressure suits just past midnight, the crew received a final message of encouragement from space officials, including the head of Russia's Federal Space Agency.
At the final salute before mounting the bus to the launching pad, a group of well-wishers greeted Walker with letters spelling out "Go Shannon!"
Before the bus engines started up, Yurchikhin's young daughter, Yelena, was held aloft and kissed her father through the glass.
At the pad, the astronauts sat, tightly bound into their seats in the rocket some two hours before the launch, while their family and colleagues anxiously waited at a viewing platform a little more than one kilometer away.
Against the backdrop of the starkly dim steppe, lights on the gantry holding up the Soyuz rocket shimmered on the launch pad known as Gagarin's Pad. It is the site from which the Soviet Union sent off Yury Gagarin in 1961 to become the first human in space.
In the hour before the launch, regular updates on the final preparations crackled out of speakers at the viewing platform.
When the time came, the rocket roared to life and gradually lifted off the ground before darting off into the heavens, dramatically turning the sky a shade of phosphorous white.
"That was probably one of the more beautiful launches I have ever seen," NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said.
The crew is scheduled to reach the station Friday.
(Reuters, AP)