A Soyuz spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts docked at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday after a trip made in just three hours, a new speed record.

Departing Wednesday at 5:45 am from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft in which Kathleen Rubins, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Svertchkov had taken place docked with the International Space Station at 8:48 am.

"A new record has been set. The total time between the launch and the docking of the Soyuz was 3 hours and 3 minutes", greeted in a statement the Russian space agency Roskosmos a few minutes after this docking at the Station, in orbit 408 kilometers above the Earth.

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Pandemic Precautions

The fastest flights to the ISS have so far taken around six hours.

This new performance is made possible thanks to a new guidance system making it possible to reach the ISS in just two orbits, against at least three previously.

This system had been tested in April 2019 with a Progress vessel, used to supply the International Station with equipment.

Welcome home!

With the Soyuz hatch opened at 7:07 am ET, the @Space_Station crew has doubled.

Astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov are now residents of our orbiting laboratory: https://t.co/6NJI6TvEGKpic.twitter.com/LglU99Jm0l

- NASA (@NASA) October 14, 2020

The three scientists joined the current occupants Chris Cassidy (Nasa), Anatoly Ivanichine and Ivan Vagner (Roskosmos) on the Orbital Station, whose return to Earth is scheduled for October 22.

Special precautions have been taken in this period of the global coronavirus pandemic, including an enhanced quarantine for the three cosmonauts to rule out any risk of importing Covid-19 onto the station.

"We have a very strict quarantine, almost since March for me," said Kathleen Rubins during the pre-launch press conference, adding that cosmonauts were tested very regularly.

Russian aerospace in crisis

This takeoff of a Russian rocket to the ISS is the first since the successful launch of the American rocket SpaceX on May 30 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which ended a nine-year Russian monopoly on flights inhabited to the Station.

Marked by several failed launches in recent years and repeated corruption scandals, the Russian space sector will have to reinvent itself to overcome the end of this monopoly which deals it a severe blow.

On the one hand, because Roskosmos billed approximately $ 80 million for each seat to the ISS, but also because Russian space suffers from a glaring lack of innovations that these launches managed to hide.

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The ISS is nonetheless one of the few areas where cooperation between Russians and Westerners still works and the cosmonauts who left on Wednesday preferred to emphasize the ability of space travel to bring together rival nations for a common cause.

"We don't choose its launch date or what happens on the Station but I certainly feel incredibly lucky," said Kathleen Rubins, avoiding talking about SpaceX and the new era that is coming.

In the shadow of this cooperation, Roskosmos boss Dmitry Rogozin announced this week that Russia will probably not participate in the future station in orbit around the Moon that the United States plans to assemble from 2023. The Lunar Gateway "in its current form is too American-centric," he said Monday.