Three astronauts arrived on Tuesday at the International Space Station, including Tim Peake, the first Briton who will board the orbiting outpost, dpa reported. Peake, 43, a former helicopter pilot, was accompanied by American Tim Kopra, 52, and Russian Yury Malenchenko, 53, aboard a Soyuz spacecraft as it blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan earlier in the day. The journey to the station took about six-and-a-half hours. The docking was performed by manual control after a malfunction with the automatic system, the acting head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Alexander Ivanov, told reporters, the Interfax news agency reported. He did not specify the nature of the malfunction. The three astronauts were scheduled to spend six months on the space station, the European Space Agency said in a statement. Peake became the eighth Briton in space after training for six years. He recently told Russian reporters that the hardest aspect of his training was learning the Russian language. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are required to know Russian and English.
