A Russian-American crew has arrived at the International Space Station, five months after a botched launch led to an emergency landing for two of the three astronauts.
This time, the Russian Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch along with Roscosmos' Alexei Ovchinin lifted off precisely as planned from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Six hours later, their capsule docked at the orbiting outpost.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated the crew on a successful launch.
The trio will join NASA's Anne McClain, Roscosmos' Oleg Kononenko and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency who are already on the space station.
They will conduct work on hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science.
When one of the four strap-on boosters for their Soyuz failed to separate properly two minutes after their launch in October, Hague and Ovchinin were jettisoned from the rocket.
Their rescue capsule plunged steeply back to Earth with its lights flashing and alarms screaming, subjecting the crew to seven times the force of gravity.
The October failure was the first aborted launch for the Russian space program in 35 years and only the third in history. Each time, the rocket's automatic rescue system kept the crew safe.
A Russian investigation attributed October's launch failure to a sensor that was damaged during the rocket's final assembly. The next crew launch to the space station in December went on without a hitch.
Since the 2011 retirement of the US shuttle fleet, Russia's Soyuz spacecraft have been the only vehicles that ferry crews to the space station.
NASA, however, is counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start launching astronauts later this year.
The SpaceX ship Dragon returned Friday from a six-day test flight to the space station and could take astronauts there on its next flight as early as this summer.
