While the Soyuz rocket has already flown in unmanned condition several times since its failure to put the Soyuz MS-10 crew into orbit earlier this year (the crew escaped safely), it had yet to fly humans since. This has now changed. A Soyuz FG successfully launched a crew of three – Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos, Flight Engineer Anne McClain of NASA, and Flight Engineer David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) – into low Earth orbit their Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft on 3 December 2018. The lift off at 1131 GMT was from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, near Tyuratam, Kazakhstan. After a six hour, four orbit transit, the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s Poisk module at 1733 GMT on the same day and the crew transferred to join their three other colleagues on the station.
A Soyuz-FG rocket launches the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft Courtesy: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
