Crew blasts off for space station

American Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency spent weeks in quarantine before Wednesday’s launch from a facility in Kazakhstan. They docked at the International Space Station just three hours later for their six-month stay.

What will they do there? The scientists are running experiments on bioprinting tissues, growing cells in space, and DNA sequencing. They will also try to identify the location of an oxygen leak on the station that hasn’t posed any immediate danger to the crew. NASA commander Chris Cassidy and Russians Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner will head back to Earth in about a week. NASA’s SpaceX Crew Dragon mission, carrying three Americans and a Japanese astronaut, is scheduled to take off for the station in November.

Dig deeper: From the WORLD archives, read Daniel James Devine’s report about NASA’s reliance on private firms.