A three-man crew donned pressure suits, strapped into a Russian Soyuz space capsule and rode a rocket into orbit Friday, starting a record-setting expedition on the International Space Station that — for two of the crew members — will last for 342 days.
Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly — all space station veterans — suited up in Sokol spacesuits before launching from Kazakhstan on Friday, then took a bus ride to the launch pad a few hours before liftoff.
The images below chronicle the crew’s activities before departing on the marathon spaceflight and show the Soyuz rocket’s fiery blastoff in the predawn hours at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
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