🚀 Liftoff of a Soyuz rocket carrying three space travelers to the @ISS! At 3:42 a.m. EDT on Fri., April 9, the Soyuz MS-18 successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, with Mark Vande Hei of @NASAAstronauts, and cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov of Roscosmos aboard. The trio took a fast-track, three-hour, two-orbit journey, docking their spacecraft at 7:05 a.m. EDT and joining the seven crew members currently living and working on the International Space Station. This launch took place just days before the 60th anniversary of a historic milestone in spaceflight: on April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took to the skies, ascending into orbit for 108 minutes of history. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls #Soyuz #Rockets #Spaceflight #Kazkhstan #Liftoff