 And liftoff. The year in space starts now. Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka on their way towards the International Space Station. Hey guys, this is Sean with The Verge and we just watched three astronauts take off for the International Space Station aboard a 300 ton Soyuz rocket. This is the 43rd mission to the International Space Station, but this is no ordinary mission. Two of the astronauts are actually going to go to the station to live for an entire year. Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko won't walk on this Earth again until March of next year. And that blows away the previous space station record of seven months set back in 2007. When Kelly comes back he will have spent 522 days off planet, more than any other American. Now the world records are actually held by a couple Russian cosmonauts, one of which has actually spent over 800 days in space. And that record is going to be broken by a third crew member, Gennady Padalka. Now we've been sending astronauts to space for about a half a century, to the space station and to the moon, so we know a lot about the effects of microgravity on the body. And they're not great. Radiation exposure is a big worry, but so is muscle and bone loss, to the point that astronauts actually spend about two hours every day working out on custom built zero gravity exercise machines. But now we can measure these effects better than ever, and if we're ever going to get past low Earth orbit, we're going to need to know more about what happens to the human body in space. And that's what this mission is all about. NASA will be studying a number of things in the coming year, like microgravity's effect on the swelling of the brain, vision impairment, muscle and bone loss, and more. Now what's even cooler about this mission is NASA is also going to be studying Scott Kelly's twin brother Mark here on Earth. He's a retired astronaut himself. They're not going to be in the same controlled environment, but NASA is going to be able to use observational research to understand on a genetic level what happens to Scott Kelly's body while he's in space for a year. So hopefully NASA is going to learn a lot in the next year with this mission, because we're going to need that knowledge if we ever go back to the moon or go even further to Mars. NASA wants to send astronauts to orbit the red planet in the late 2030s, and there's a whole new set of challenges awaiting us. So the more we learn close to Earth, the better off we'll be out in space. Otherwise we're just going to be stuck sending robots.