KOROLYOV, April 10: A Russian capsule carrying South Korea’s first astronaut and a new crew for the International Space Station (ISS) docked successfully on Thursday.

Staff at mission control near Moscow applauded after the Soyuz spacecraft, which blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, locked on without incident to the ISS at 4:57 pm (1257 GMT).

“We have touch down. We now have mechanical contact,” a mission control announcer said over a loudspeaker to an outburst of clapping, while a giant screen showed the Soyuz coupled with the ISS as it orbited the Earth.

Russian commander Sergei Volkov and flight engineer Oleg Kononenko will now start their six-month stint in orbit.

South Korean spaceflight participant Yi So-yeon, a 29-year-old nanotechnology engineer, will return to Earth on April 19 with US commander Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko who have been manning the ISS. “She has now become a symbol of space cooperation between Korea and Russia,” the head of the Korean Aerospace Research Institute, Hong-Yul Paik, told a news conference.

“From now on Korea will participate in international space cooperation, space exploration and space science . . . Definitely, she is not last Korean astronaut.”—Reuters