New Soyuz capsule headed for International Space Station

We're following a rescue mission. It's headed for the International Space Station. Soyuz rocket is launching your watchnet. It's launching from Kazakhstan. It doesn't have any humans on board. But will be sent up to space to be used as a ride home? Let's watch. There it goes.

New ride back to Earth for Rubio, Prokopiev and Patelin takes aim on the International Space Station. Twenty seconds into the flight roll program confirmed. Beautiful human achievement. And now we're going to talk about it with CBS News Space consultant Bill Harwood. Who joins me now? Well, you've seen a lot of these, but it's still pretty neat to see. Remind us again. Sorry, I get overwhelmed.

You've seen many of them. I get overwhelmed. Remind us why this mission is happening and what happened to the original mission. That's the whole point of this flight. There's no one on board because it is a rescue flight of sorts. There's three crew members on board the International Space Station, two cosmonauts and an astronaut who launched on an earlier Soyuz spacecraft. They got hit by a micro meteoroid back in December and it's now disabled.

So if you want to think about it that way, they don't have a way home until this spacecraft gets there. Now, you know, as always NASA has a plan B the Russians do too. And if something happened that required an immediate evacuation before this ship gets there, they've got a way to do that. You know, two guys, the cosmonauts would come home on the damaged Soyuz and the NASA astronaut would come home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. But they don't want it to come to that. They want to get this spacecraft there. That'll serve as a lifeboat then for these three crew members.

And the only downside really, if you want to think about it, is going to extend their mission from six months to a full year in space before they'll be ready to come home. So, well, help me parse that. So first of all, how long does it take for the carpool ride to arrive? And then once it gets there, how long before they can hop on it and come back to the planet Earth? Well, it only takes about nine minutes to get to orbit. It's going to take until Saturday night for this spacecraft to catch up to the space station. It'll dock under remote control. That shouldn't be a problem. And then they're in good shape.

I mean, they've got a full set of lifeboats, if you will, a Crew Dragon and the new Soyuz. So all seven crew members on the space station would have a way home if there was an emergency. But of course, they're hoping it won't come to that and they're just going to carry out their regular missions. All right, Bill Harwood at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It's always a joy to have you. Thanks.

NASA, International Space Station, soyuz, space, Kazakhstan