Article Posted on : - Dec 21, 2009

The Soyuz TMA-17 spacecraft being launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Image credit: NASA TV

BAIKONUR (AP/PTI): A Russian rocket blasted off from a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and hurtled spaceward on Monday, shuttling an American, a Russian and a Japanese astronaut to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz TMA-17's three astronauts will take the orbiting laboratory's permanent crew to five following the early-hours launch, the first-ever blastoff of a Soyuz rocket on a winter night.

Timothy J Creamer, Soichi Nohuchi and Oleg Kotov are to join current inhabitants, American Jeff Williams and Russian Maxim Surayev, who have been alone on the space station for three weeks.

A NASA television Webcast showed the crew giving a thumbs up sign as the vessel thundered skyward.

The Soyuz will travel for about two days before docking with the space station 350 kilometers above Earth.

Striking a festive mood, the space station this week beamed a video Christmas greeting to Earth.

On its Web site, the US space agency NASA has created a series of virtual postcards for members of the public to send to the space station with their holiday greetings.

The first space station crew arrived in 2000, two years after the first part was launched. Until this year, no more than three people lived up there at a time, although there were as many as six people aboard for short periods when a space tourist would go up with one crew, spend a week or so aboard and come back with another crew.