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The Soyuz programme is a human spaceflight programme initiated by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. The Soyuz spacecraft was originally part of a Moon landing project intended to put a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon. It is the third Soviet human spaceflight programme after the Vostok (1961–1963) and Voskhod (1964–1965) programmes. It is now the responsibility of the Russian Roscosmos space agency, and between the retirement of the Space Shuttle programme in 2011 and the launch of Crew Dragon in 2020, it served as the only vehicle for human spaceflight to the International Space Station.
This picture shows the launch of the Soyuz TMA-13 mission at Gagarin's Start launchpad of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 12 October 2008.Photograph credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls; retouched by Lošmi