A multinational crew including a US astronaut who is the oldest and most experienced woman to fly in space blasted off from Kazakhstan for a two-day journey to the International Space Station.

The Russian Soyuz rocket carrying American Peggy Whitson, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Thursday night local time.



Whitson, 56, a biochemist and Nasa’s former chief astronaut, is making her third trip to the station.

By the time she returns to Earth in six months she will have accumulated more time in orbit than any other US astronaut, surpassing the 534-day record set in September by astronaut Jeff Williams.

“The most important thing about the station is the friendships and the work we accomplish there,” Whitson said during a prelaunch news conference on Wednesday in Kazakhstan.

Novitskiy, 45, who is making his second spaceflight, added: “The station is ... a place where we can demonstrate to the entire world that you can have normal relations, where you can work without being distracted by things that don’t really matter.”

Pesquet, 38, is a rookie astronaut representing the European Space Agency.

The crew are due to reach the station on Saturday, where they will be greeted by Nasa astronaut Shane Kimbrough and Russian flight engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, who arrived on 21 October.

The combined crew will be one of the last six-member teams to live on the station for a while. Beginning in March, Russia plans to cut the number of cosmonauts serving on the station to two from three, following delays in launching a new science laboratory. The Multipurpose Laboratory Module is now expected to be launched in 2018.