Astronaut From Napa Begins Four-Month Mission On Space Station
NAPA (KCBS / AP) -- Three astronauts, including a native of the Bay Area, boarded the International Space Station on Saturday after a two-day journey aboard a Russian Soyuz space capsule.
The capsule docked smoothly with the space station at 0406 GMT (12:06 a.m. EDT) Saturday at a height of 412 kilometers (254 miles) above the Earth. Russia's space agency Roscosmos said the crew entered the station about two hours later.
NASA's Kate Rubins, along with Russian Anatoly Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi of the Japanese space agency JAXA are beginning a four-month stay on the orbiting space laboratory. They joined American Jeff Williams and Russians Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin, who have been aboard since mid-March.
Rubins grew up in Napa and was a graduate of Vintage High School, where she was a top student and an editor of the campus newspaper.
"One of the most high-powered students I ever had," Vintage High journalism teacher Newton Thomas told KCBS. "She was wickedly smart, had a great sense of humor and was just absolutely driven. And I think she may have well have mentioned at that time that her long-term goals perhaps involved NASA."
The capsule blasted off from Russia's manned space complex in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on Thursday.
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