Moscow – Three Russian and American astronauts left for the International Space Station on Friday.
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov took off aboard the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft from Russia-rented Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan at 12:42 PM.
The capsule is scheduled to dock at the orbit lab after a three-hour journey in two orbits.
This is the second space mission for Vande Hei, the third for Novitskiy and the first for Dubrov.
During their time on the ISS, they will work on hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physics and earth sciences.
The launch comes three days before the 60th anniversary of the first space flight by a human, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and the 40th anniversary of the first launch of the NASA space shuttle.
Already on the space station are NASA members Kate Rubins, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker; cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and astronaut Soichi Noguchi from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov arrived aboard another Soyuz capsule in October, and Hopkins, Glover, Walker and Noguchi – the crew of SpaceX’s Dragon Resilience Crew – joined them in November.