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		</div><p><a href="http://londonglossy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/launch-marks-decade-of-missions.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full" title="The Soyuz TMA-20 rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan" src="http://londonglossy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/min-launch-marks-decade-of-missions.jpg" alt="The Soyuz TMA-20 rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan"/></a></p>
<p>Astronauts from the US, Russia and Italy have blasted off into the darkness, casting a warm orange glow over the chilly plains of Kazakhstan with their Soyuz spacecraft as they began a mission to the International Space Station.</p>
<p>Russia&#8217;s Dmitry Kondratyev, Nasa astronaut Catherine Coleman and the European Space Agency&#8217;s Paolo Nespoli of Italy rode into space on the Soyuz TMA-20, which plans to dock at the orbiting laboratory on Friday.</p>
<p>Family and colleagues of the crew waited nervously before the launch, which kicked off with a piercing white flash succeeded by a roaring wall of sound.</p>
<p>Within seconds, the rocket seemed little more than a blur of incandescent flames fading into the distance.</p>
<p>Officials at the viewing platform gave status updates at 20-second intervals over loudspeakers until reaching the nine-minute mark, indicating the ship had reached the relative safety of orbit, prompting a lively round of cheers.</p>
<p>At that moment, a plush toy tiger that Coleman brought as the crew&#8217;s mascot began floating in front of her, signalling the beginning of weightlessness as the spaceship reached an altitude of more than 125 miles above Earth, according to Nasa television footage.</p>
<p>The flight caps a decade of manned missions to the space station, which began in October 2000.</p>
<p>The departure of the Soyuz had been pushed back several days due the last-minute replacement of its re-entry module, which had been damaged during unloading earlier this year at the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Central Asian steppes.</p>
<p>Replacing a key module so late in the launch schedule had caused some apprehension, although Mr Kondratyev shrugged such worries off at a final press conference.</p>
<p>&#8220;All the procedures needed to check the integrity of the ship have been completed, and all those have shown positive results,&#8221; he said.</p>
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