Three astronauts aboard a Soyuz spacecraft have launched for their six-hour trip to join three crewmates on the International Space Station.

Russian Soyuz Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, and NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan at 4:31 p.m. ET Tuesday (12:31 a.m. local time Wednesday).

They are expected to orbit the Earth four times and then dock to the space station's Rassvet module at 10:17 p.m. ET.

There, they will join Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin, and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who arrived at the space station in March. Vinogradov is currently commander of the space station. He will hand command over to Yurchikhin in September, when Vinogradov, Misurkin and Cassidy head back to Earth.

Yurchikin, Nyberg and Parmitano are expected to return home in November.

Tuesday's flight will be the second manned Soyuz to take a new, faster trajectory to the space station instead of the two-day trip that used to be the norm. The three astronauts already aboard the space station pioneered the new trajectory in March. At that point, it had already been tested with three unmanned spacecraft.