Russian Craft Soars Toward Space Station

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The New York Sun

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — A Russian spacecraft soared from the Kazakh steppe toward the international space station yesterday, carrying a Malaysian, a Russian, and Peggy Whitson, the American who will become the first woman to command the orbital outpost. The Soyuz-FG rocket lifted off on schedule, rising into a darkening sky over the Russian-operated Baikonur launch facility. It was topped by a spacecraft that is to deliver Ms. Whitson, Yuri Malenchenko, who is a veteran Russian cosmonaut, and Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, a Malaysian physician, to the space station tomorrow.

Applause broke out among space officials and other onlookers after the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft shed its rocket stages and entered orbit. “Now they are stars in space, with their training, and with their beautiful machine, they will do good,” a former space station astronaut, Michael Fincke, said.

Ms. Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, is making her second trip to the station.

A day before the launch, a Russian space official presented her with a traditional Kazakh whip to “manage her crew.”

But Mr. Fincke said Ms. Whitson, 47, would not need it to lead a successful mission.

“She inspires people,” he said.

Sheikh Muszaphar, a 35-year-old orthopedic surgeon, is to spend about 10 days on the station, performing experiments involving diseases and the effects of microgravity and space radiation on cells and genes.

His parents watched the liftoff from an observation area, praying and in tears.

“I’m happy for my country, for Russia, for the United States, and everybody,” his father, Sheikh Mustapha Shukor, said.

Sheikh Muszaphar is not the first Muslim in space — Prince Sultan bin Salman of Saudi Arabia joined the crew of the shuttle Discovery in 1985.


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