Three new astronauts arrive at International Space Station for 4-month stay

MOSCOW – Three astronauts from the United States, Russia and Japan boarded the International Space Station on Saturday after a two-day journey aboard a Russian Soyuz space capsule.

The capsule docked smoothly with the space station at 0406 GMT (12:06 a.m. ET) Saturday at a height of 412 kilometres above the Earth. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said the crew entered the station about two hours later.

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Russian Anatoly Ivanishin, NASA’s Kathleen Rubins and Takuya Onishi of the Japanese space agency JAXA are beginning a four-month stay on the orbiting space laboratory. They joined American Jeff Williams and Russians Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin, who have been aboard since mid-March.

The capsule blasted off from Russia’s manned space complex in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on Thursday.

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