Spacecraft with American, 2 Russians blasts off and docks with space station

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut blasted off from Kazakhstan Wednesday, climbed smoothly into orbit and docked with the International Space Station after an abbreviated six-hour rendezvous, boosting the lab's crew back to six.

The mission kicks off an exceptionally busy few months aboard the space station, with the arrival and departure of multiple cargo ships, a visit by the Olympic torch for a spacewalk photo op in early November and an unusual interlude with an expanded crew of nine astronauts and cosmonauts.

The station has been staffed by a reduced crew of three -- Expedition 37 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and Karen Nyberg -- since mid September when two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut departed after a five-and-a-half-month stay in orbit.

But the Soyuz TMA-10M launch Wednesday boosted the lab crew back to six just a few days before the delayed arrival of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus cargo ship making its maiden flight.

Soyuz TMA-10M commander Oleg Kotov, a space station veteran, rookie flight engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy and first-time NASA flier Michael Hopkins lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:58:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday (GMT-4; 2:58 a.m. Thursday local time).

Trailing a brilliant plume of flame from its liquid-fueled engines, the Soyuz booster climbed away to the northeast, launching almost directly into the plane of the space station's orbit.

Hopkins is the first of his 14-member 2009 astronaut class to win a flight assignment. Raised on a farm in Missouri, captain of his University of Illinois football team and an Air Force flight test engineer, Hopkins made the climb to space strapped into the right seat of the cramped Soyuz command module.

Kotov, the veteran commander, monitored cockpit displays from the center seat with Ryazanskiy strapped in to his left.

The ascent appeared to go smoothly and live television from inside the cramped Soyuz command module showed all three crew members calmly monitoring their instruments amid routine calls to and from mission control near Moscow.

"Vibration, oscillations, within norms," Kotov reported at one point. "Nominal operation of the systems."

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Spacecraft with American, 2 Russians blasts off and docks with space station