Q&A with Michel Denis, ExoMars flight director

By the light of a waning moon, a Russian rocket carrying a veteran cosmonaut, a French flight engineer making his first flight and America’s most experienced female astronaut blasted off and streaked smoothly into orbit Thursday, the first step in a two-day rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Teams working at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida last week connected a U.S.-built Orion crew module with its European-made power and propulsion element for the first time, a significant accomplishment ahead of the spacecraft’s shipment to Ohio this fall for testing inside the world’s largest vacuum chamber.

Three crewmen from Russia, the United States and Great Britain blasted off toward the International Space Station on Tuesday, rocketing into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in pursuit of the orbiting research lab.