BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — For the first time in history, the Olympic torch will be taken on a spacewalk.
The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics torch will be sent to the international space station with the next crew, who blast off early Thursday from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Russia’s Mikhail Tyurin, NASA’s Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata of Japan are heading to the space station on a Russian Soyuz rocket that has been emblazoned with the emblem of the Sochi Winter Games.
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 Olympic torch has flown into space before — in 1996 aboard the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis for the Atlanta Summer Olympics — but it has never yet been taken outside a spacecraft.
The torch will stay in space for five days until the returning crew takes it back to Earth next Monday.
