A Russian spacecraft blasted off Thursday from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan carrying a cosmonaut, astronaut and an American space tourist.

The Soyuz TMA-14's Commander Gennady Padalka of Russia, Michael Barrat of the U.S. space agency NASA, and American billionaire Charles Simonyi will go to the International Space Station (ISS) and join its three crew on March 28, the scheduled arrival of the Soyuz spacecraft.

NASA engineers on Monday are figuring out if the International Space Station (ISS) should maneuver to avoid getting hit by a debris or piece of a Soviet Union-era satellite.

The piece of the Russian Kosmos 1275 will pass about half a mile from the space station at 2:14 a.m. CDT (7:14 a.m. GMT) Tuesday, said Bill Jeffs, a spokesman at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, according to CNN.

A grapefruit-sized space debris orbiting at 21,000 miles per hour missed hitting the International Space Station (ISS) Wednesday and aborted an evacuation by its three astronauts, the U.S. space agency said.

The object measuring five inches in diameter is part of an old rocket motor of a U.S. Navy global positioning system satellite and was detected by the space junk-tracking U.S. Strategic Command (STATCOM) late Wednesday.

Two astronauts of the International Space Station walked in space Tuesday to set up a biology experiment outside the orbiting laboratory and fix a docking port.

American Michael Fincke and Russian Yuri Lonchakov reinstalled the European Space Agency's Expose R biology experiment container. Plant seeds and spores of bacteria and fungi inside the container will be exposed to weightlessness, sun rays and temperature extremes for 18 months as part of a scientific study to determine if life forms originated on Earth or in outer space.

A Russian man died after swallowing a bottle of Viagra to keep him going for a 12-hour sex marathon with two female friends.

The women reportedly bet Russian mechanic Sergey Tuganov $4,300 that he wouldn't be able to follow through on his half-day sex marathon claims. But soon after winning the bet, the 28-year-old died of an apparent heart attack.