WATCH spectacular on-board footage of the Soyuz rocket blasting off
Thrilling footage has been released showing the Russian Soyuz rocket shooting upwards as it carries ..
Thrilling footage has been released showing the Russian Soyuz rocket shooting upwards as it carries the MS-11 spacecraft with a three-man crew on board to the International Space Station (ISS).
The video taken by a camera mounted on the hull of the rocket shows it blast off from the launch pad in clouds of fire and smoke. With a pillar of fire coming out of its propulsion nozzle, the rocket arcs into space, leaving the Baikonur spaceport far behind.
In less than a minute, the rocket bursts through cloud cover. A minute later, it reaches the upper layers of the atmosphere, where the side boosters get cut off, detach and fall back to Earth.
On December 3, the Soyuz MS-11 carried Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, Canadian David Saint-Jacques and NASAs Anne McClain from Earth into orbit. Kononenko and Saint-Jacques were the backup crew members for the previous MS-10 mission which ended with a booster separation failure.
The October 11 launch saw two crew members, Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague, escape certain death in a massive high-altitude blast, as their capsule was pulled away from the Soyuz-FG rocket by the time-proven Russian emergency rescue system SAS before it landed back in Kazakhstan. It turned out the poorly-assembled booster damaged the craft when it detached from the second stage.
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