Soyuz blasts off with crew bound for space station

Braving arctic temperatures and a brutal wind chill, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft roared to life and streaked smoothly into orbit Wednesday, carrying a veteran three-man crew on a two-day flight to the International Space Station. With commander Roman Romanenko at the controls, the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft climbed away from its launching stand at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 7:12:35 a.m. EST (GMT-5; 6:12 p.m. local time), roughly the moment Earth's rotation carried the pad into the plane of the space station's orbit. More

(Source: SpaceFlight Now - Dec 20)