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Soyuz spacecraft to deliver fully Russian crew to orbital outpost next March

The Soyuz MS-21 spaceship will deliver cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov to the space station

Oleg Artemyev Sergei Savostyanov/TASS

Oleg Artemyev

© Sergei Savostyanov/TASS

MOSCOW, August 31. /TASS/. A Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft delivering a fully Russian crew to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time since 2000 will blast off on March 18, 2022, according to the Russian Space magazine (an official publication of the federal agency Roscosmos) released on Tuesday.

According to the magazine, the Soyuz MS-21 spaceship will deliver cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov to the space station. Before that, a fully Russian crew made a space flight to the Mir orbital station in 2000.

Also, the descent capsule of a Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft with Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov, Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei is scheduled to land on March 28, the magazine suggests.

The first launch of a Progress resupply ship in 2002 is scheduled for February 16 and the second lift-off for June. The Soyuz MS-19 spaceship is also expected to make two re-dockings in February and March next year.

It was previously planned that a fully Russian crew would travel to the ISS in April 2021. However, NASA later bought a seat for a US astronaut on a Soyuz spacecraft.

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