BAIKONUR: A three-man space crew featuring American and Japanese rookie astronauts as well as an experienced Russian cosmonaut blasted off on Sunday for a six-month mission at the International Space Station.

Scott Tingle of Nasa, Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency powered into the sky in a Soyuz MS-07 spacecraft from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1:21pm.

Nasa TV footage from inside the Soyuz capsule showed a toy poodle made by Shkaplerov’s cousin and modelled on the cosmonaut’s family dog floating around the capsule as the spacecraft entered zero gravity.

Roscosmos confirmed the Soyuz crew had launched “successfully” in a Sunday statement on the space agency’s website.

While most flights to the ISS now take around six hours, the trio are taking the more circuitous two-day route due to the lab’s position in space at the time of the launch. Docking is expected on Tuesday.

Both Tingle, 52, and Kanai, 40, are first-time flyers but flight commander Shkaplerov, 43, is an experienced hand.

The former Russian military pilot has spent exactly a year in space over two missions and will mark his birthday in orbit for the third time in February next year.

The ISS laboratory, a rare example of American and Russian cooperation, has been orbiting Earth at about 28,000 kilometres per hour since 1998.

Meanwhile, SpaceX’s unmanned Dragon cargo ship docked on Sunday with the International Space Station, bringing supplies and experiments for the astronauts in orbit.

Three minutes after launch the booster and second stage of the rocket separated.

The second stage continued to propel the Dragon toward the International Space Station, while the rocket booster landed upright on solid ground at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Published in Dawn, December 18th, 2017