Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft reaches ISS as NASA astronaut Kate Rubins makes her second trip

Russia's Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft left for the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday morning, carrying Expedition 64 astronaut Kathleen “Kate” Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.The spacecraft left for the space station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1:45 am EDT or 11:15 am IST. The craft will go on a “two-orbit” journey to reach the station in three hours.At the time of publishing, the spacecraft had already reached the station and Expedition 64 was busy docking to the ISS.The three crew members will spend six months aboard the space station. This is Rubins’ second voyage into space after she was aboard the Soyuz MS spacecraft on its first test flight to the ISS in July 2016. NASA said that that spacecraft was also launched from Kazakhstan.Ahead of the launch, the NASA astronaut had expressed her excitement to Space.com. “We just finished our final exams before spaceflight, and it's a little bit hard to think about anything except for the exams when you're getting ready for them,” she told the portal.[caption id="attachment_8913921" align="alignnone" width="1280"]

Expedition 64 NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, left, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov, center, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, right, of Roscosmos are seen as they depart Building 254 to head to their launch onboard the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/GCTC/Andrey Shelepin[/caption]Kate also said how she was looking forward to going back to space and welcoming the “first operational commercial crew vehicle to (the) station”. Kathleen, who holds a PhD in Cancer Biology and was the first person to sequence DNA in space. On her second visit to the station, she expressed interest in the “microbiome of the space station” and experiments on live cells. She said that the team will be focusing on “tissue architecture” in space and how to create “delicate tissue structures in space”.Interestingly, she will be at the ISS when it celebrates 20 years of having a continuous human presence. She will be also voting from space in the US presidential elections, along with the other American astronauts.