Soyuz rocket brings new three-person American-Russian crew to the ISS (video)

A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts launched to the International Space Station today (September 11).

NASA astronaut Don Pettit accompanied Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which lifted off today at 12:23 p.m. EDT (4:23 p.m. GMT; 9:23 p.m. Baikonur time) aboard a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The trio will join the Expedition 71 crew for a six-month mission aboard the ISS.

The flight went smoothly, said NASA launch commentator Anna Schneider at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “All three stages performed as expected during the eight-minute, 45-second flight that placed Soyuz into its preliminary orbit,” Schneider said at the end of NASA's coverage. With the successful orbital entry, there are now 19 people in orbit in four different spacecraft, a record. (20 people have previously been in space at the same time, but six of those were in suborbital space.)

The Soyuz MS-26 capsule is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) today at 3:33 p.m. EDT (7:33 p.m. GMT). Coverage of the docking will begin at 2:30 p.m. EDT (6:30 p.m. GMT).

The hatch between Soyuz and the ISS will open at 5:50 p.m. EDT (9:50 p.m. GMT). NASA coverage and opening remarks will begin at 5:30 p.m. EDT (10:30 p.m. GMT). Both events will be streamed live here on Space.com via NASA+ (formerly NASA Television).

Every crew member on this flight has flown in space before. This is Pettit's fourth launch and will add to his total of 370 days in space, according to NASA statistics. His first mission, Expedition 6, was scheduled to last 2.5 months in space after a November 23, 2002 launch on the space shuttle Endeavour as part of the STS-113 mission.

However, the landing was postponed until May 3, 2003, after the shuttle fleet was grounded following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003, which killed seven astronauts. Pettit's arrival on Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft was safe but eventful: due to a malfunction, the spacecraft landed 475 kilometers from its target, causing a long delay for ground teams to reach the crew.

Related: Three astronauts reach the ISS on board the Russian Soyuz spacecraft