Olympic torch blasts into space ahead of Games

The Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Soyuz TMA-11M space ship carrying a new crew to the International Space Station, ISS, blasts off at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2013. The Russian rocket carries Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and US astronaut Rick Mastracchio. The crew will deliver Olympic torch to space as part of the ongoing Olympic torch relay. The torch will be brought back along with the station’s current crew. AP

MOSCOW — A rocket carrying the Olympic flame successfully blasted off Thursday from earth ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Games.

NASA Live TV showed the rocket, emblazoned with the pale blue Sochi 2014 logo, launching from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome on a clear morning in Kazakhstan.

The torch will make its way to the International Space Station before being taken into space itself — making it the Olympic flame’s first spacewalk in history.

Russia’s Mikhail Tyurin, NASA’s Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata of Japan beamed at the crowd as they carried the lit torch aboard the Soyuz rocket.

For safety reasons, the torch will not burn when it’s onboard the space outpost. Lighting it would consume precious oxygen and pose a threat to the crew. The crew will carry the unlit torch around the station’s numerous modules before taking it out on a spacewalk.

The Olympic torch has flown into space once before — in 1996 aboard the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis for the Atlanta Summer Olympics — but will be taken outside the spacecraft for the first time in history.

“It’s a great pleasure and responsibility getting to work with this symbol of peace,” Tyurin told journalists on Wednesday ahead of the launch.

The torch will remain in space for five days. Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergei Ryazanskiy, who are currently manning the International Space Station, will take the flame for a spacewalk on Saturday, before it is returned to earth by three astronauts on Monday.

The four-month Sochi torch relay, which started in Moscow on Oct. 7, is the longest in the history of the Olympics. For most of the 65,000-kilometer (39,000-mile) route, the flame will travel by plane, train, car and even reindeer sleigh, but 14,000 torch bearers are taking part in the relay that stops at more than 130 cities and towns.

Last month, the Olympic flame travelled to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. Later this month it will sink to the bottom of the world’s deepest lake, Lake Baikal, and in February it will reach the peak of Mount Elbrus, at 5,642 meters (18,510 feet) the highest mountain in Russia and Europe.

The torch will be used to light the Olympic flame at Sochi’s stadium on Feb. 7, marking the start of the 2014 Winter Games that run until Feb. 23.