The Olympic torch will make its first trip into space as part of Russia’s record-breaking torch relay in November ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Games.

Sochi 2014 chief Dmitry Chernyshenko has confirmed that the torch will travel to the International Space Station on the Soyuz TMA-11M spaceship, and will be taken on a spacewalk by cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky and Oleg Kotov.

For safety reasons, it is not planned to light the torch during the trip.

Chernyshenko said: “Nobody has done this before. The spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts with the Sochi 2014 Olympic torch will be an historic moment in the history of the Olympic torch relay.”

The Sochi torch relay starts in Sochi on October 7 and will travel over 50,000 miles including via car, train, plane and reindeer sleigh – making it the longest torch relay in Winter Games history.

Over 14,000 torch-bearers will carry the torch through 83 Russian regions.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.