U.S., Russian, Malaysian heading for space station
A Russian rocket blasted off from a launch facility in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, carrying an American, a Russian and a Malaysian to the international space station. The Soyuz-FG rocket soared into a darkening sky above the Kazakh steppe.
Aboard were Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, who will be the first woman to command the space station, veteran Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, and Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, the ninth Muslim in space but the first from Malaysia. They will arrive in two days.
The mission coincides with the last days of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn until sundown, but Malaysian clerics decreed that Sheikh Muszaphar will be excused from fasting while in space.
His religion also requires that he face Mecca for prayer -- a direction that will change as the spacecraft orbits the Earth -- but clerics decided that the exact location matters only for the beginning of the prayer ritual.
