KOROLEV /Moscow Region/, February 24. /TASS/. Russia’s Soyuz 2.1a carrier rocket with the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft blasted off from Pad 31 of the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan early on Friday, a TASS correspondent reported from the Mission Control Center on Friday.

Approximately nine minutes after the launch, the spacecraft will separate from the upper stage of the rocket. Its docking with the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled for 04:01 Moscow time on February 26.

There will be no cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz MS-23, but it will deliver 429 kg of cargo to the ISS for the crew. The supplies will include medical control and examination means, station cleaning and atmosphere management tools, air revitalization and water supply equipment and apparatus for scientific experiments

Vladimir Soloviev, the general designer for manned systems at Russia’s Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC) Energia and the flight director of the Russian segment of the ISS, said on Monday that the spaceship will deliver three times as much food as usual.

On December 15, 2022, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the orbital outpost experienced a coolant leak on its external radiator. After analyzing the situation, Russia’s state commission made a decision to bring the damaged Soyuz spacecraft back to Earth in crewless mode and return Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, whose mission has been prolonged for several months, aboard the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft. Initially, it was planned to send Soyuz MS-23 to space in mid-March, to take the next ISS mission to the orbital outpost.

Russian space industry specialists have carried out special investigations to find out that the Soyuz MS-22 was damaged by a sporadic micrometeoroid.