A spacecraft with three astronauts including Mr.Satoshi Furukawa on board lifted off for the International Space Station.

A Russian spacecraft Soyuz lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for the International Space Station with three astronauts from Rassia, U.S.A. and Japan on board. The Japanese astronaut, Mr.Satoshi Furukawa, is a 47-year-old surgeon from University of Tokyo Hospital. He was born in Yokohama, and graduated from the medical department of Tokyo University, which is the most difficult university to enter in Japan. He was selected as a candidate of astronauts twelve years ago, but because of two accidents happened in NASA, he had to wait for as long as 12 years. To fly into space as an astronaut has been his dream since his childhood, and his dream  has come true at last after he had begun to have the dream more than 40 years before. When he was a child, he liked to watch on TV  "Ultra Seven", one of Tsuburaya Productions Co's famed "Ultra" science fiction series. Accoding to his mother, he always said, "I want to become an Ultra Seven." He still had the dream even after he became an astronaut. Mr.Furukawa will stay in the International Space Station for 160 days until November 16th, and  will carry out many medical, physical and other kinds of experiments.