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Soyuz-FG rocket lifts off

BAIKONUR (KAZAKHSTAN): A Russian rocket, headed to international space station, blasted off from a launch facility in Kazakhstan on Wednesday. The Soyuz-FG rocket lifted off on schedule at 6.52 p.m. IST, soaring into a darkening sky above the Kazakh steppe. It was topped by a spacecraft that is to deliver American astronaut Peggy Whitson, veteran Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, a Malaysian physician, to the orbital station in about two days.

Ms. Whitson, of Beaconsfield, Iowa, is to be the first woman to command the international space station. Mr. Sheikh Muszaphar, a 35-year-old orthopaedic surgeon, is to spend about 10 days on the station as the first Malaysian in space, performing experiments involving diseases and the effects of microgravity and space radiation on cells and genes. — AP

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