Hold onto your spacesuits! 🧑🚀 The Soyuz spacecraft is cleared for a Saturday launch to the International Space Station after engineers resolved a last-minute technical hiccup. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, Belarus’s Marina Vasilevskaya, and NASA’s Tracy Dyson will blast off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome, with docking set for Monday at 15:10 GMT.
Thursday’s abrupt scrub – triggered by a glitch in a chemical power source – had space fans on edge. But Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov reassured Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko that the issue is fixed, paving the way for this high-stakes mission.
Fun fact: Vasilevskaya, a former flight attendant turned astronaut, is Belarus’s first space traveler in over a decade! 🌍 The crew will link up with the ISS, where Novitsky and Vasilevskaya will later return to Earth with current station resident Loral O’Hara on April 6. Talk about a cosmic carpool!
