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Astronauts dock with the International Space Station
Soyuz docks to the ISS, March 27, 2015. At normal speed this would take 15 minutes, so it's sped up by a factor seven or so.

At the beginning it looks like the ISS is rotating, but they wouldn't do that, they would rotate the Soyuz, but simple rotation wouldn't do the trick either. They need to adjust their position as well. It gets dark at the end of the video, which means the sun has gone down, and gone down rather suddenly. Well, when your day is only an hour and half long, and you're running the show at 7x speed, you don't have a lot of time for watching the sunset.

Via daily timewaster

Russia Strong!

Soyuz Rocket Struck by Lightning During Launch
It just makes me wonder since I've seen so many videos of rockets blowing up for no reason at all and here we get one hit dead on with a lighting bolt and it isn't even fazed. It continued on and finished putting the satellite into orbit. Seems though, that I've heard of airplanes being hit by lightning with no ill effects. It's still just creepy as hell.

Via The Unwanted Blog

Another Soyuz Preps for Launch

Expedition 49-50 Crew Prepares for Launch in Kazakhstan
The first six minutes are shots of the rocket and the spacecraft being prepared and moved to the launch site. That was pretty cool. After that they go to bloviating and they lost me.

At the 3:31 mark in the video there is a closeup of the spacecraft. You can see that the spacecraft has what look like four fold down platforms. They look like a bad idea. No attempt has made to fair them into the main body so they are going to be producing some aerodynamic drag during the trip through the atmosphere, and why would you need platforms to stand on anyway? Unless they are only there to facilitate preparations for launch, and they take them off prior to launch. But just saying that sounds dumb.

The Wikipedia article about the Soyuz, in the section about the Launch Escape System, mentions that "Four folding stabilizers were added to improve aerodynamic stability during descent." I suppose that's what they could be, but they really look tacked on. But maybe if you've got a rocket as powerful as the Soyuz, you can afford to have some tacked on gee-gaws sticking out in the slipstream.