Article Posted on : - Oct 24, 2012

The Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft blasts through the atmosphere after launching on time. Photo: NASA TV.

BAIKONUR (AP): A Russian spacecraft blasted off into a clear Central Asian sky on Tuesday, carrying a three-man crew on their way to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz TMA-06M lifted off from the rolling steppes of Kazakhstan as scheduled on Tuesday afternoon to deliver NASA astronaut Kevin Ford and Russians Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin to the orbiting station.

"I spoke with the astronauts after they reached orbit," Russian Space Agency chief Vladimir Popovkin said. "They feel well. Everything went fine despite the windy conditions."

After a two-day journey, the astronauts will join Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams, Russia's Yuri Malenchenko and Aki Hoshide of Japan's JAXA agency.

Of the three who blasted off on Tuesday, only Ford has flown in space before. He spent two weeks in space as pilot of the space shuttle Discovery in 2009 on a mission to transport scientific equipment to the station.

For the first time since 1984, the manned launch took place from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome's launch pad 31. The pad that is normally used, from which Yury Gagarin began his landmark space mission in 1961, is undergoing modernisation.

The Soyuz craft is the only means for astronauts to reach the space station since the decommissioning of the US shuttle fleet in 2011.