A crew of U.S. and Russian astronauts blasted off to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket launched from a facility in Kazakhstan, the Associated Press reports. The Russian Soyuz launched at 2:25 a.m. Friday local time carryingthe first Russian woman to serve on the ISS, one Russian and one American astronaut. The craft docked at the orbiting space outpost at 10:11 p.m. EDT, according to a NASA twitter post.

NASA’s Barry Wilmore and Russians Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova are set to serve a six-month stint at the station.

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The Soyuz entered orbit about 10 minutes after launching.A live television broadcast by U.S. space agency NASA showed a toy rabbit holding a tiny Russian flag floating above the crew’s head about nine minutes into the flight, Reuters reports. The craft dockeda the ISS about six hours after the launch. NASA confirmed on Thursday night that the craft had successfully docked at the ISS.

This is the first space mission for Serova, who is the first Russian woman to fly to space since 1997 and also the first to serve on the ISS. Serova, a 38-year-old a space industry engineer, is only the fourth Russian woman to fly to space, Reuters reports. RussianValentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space in 1963.

"There were a number of women on the ISS before me, but I will be the first Russian woman cosmonaut," she said in a NASA interview, according to CBS News. "I never thought about it too much because space is what I do for work, and that's what I think about it: it's my work. But obviously for Russian women it might be a breakthrough in this area."

Serovabristled at questions from reporters at a pre-flight press conference about how she would do her hair aboard the ISS, CBS News reports.

"I have a question for you," Serova said. "Why don't you ask the question about Alexander's hair? I'm sorry, this is my answer."

Wilmore, Samokutyaev and Serova will join Russian Commander Maxim Suraev, U.S. Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman and Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency aboard the 15-nation orbiting laboratory. Suraev, Wiseman and Gerst have manned the station since May and will return home in November.

The Russian Soyuz is currently the only spacecraft that is able to ferry cosmonauts to the ISS since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet in 2011. Earlier this month, NASA announced that Boeing and SpaceX have been selected to transport crew to the station, likely by 2017.

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Expedition 36 Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) is carried to the medical tent shortly after he and, Commander Pavel Vinogradov of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy of NASA landed in their Soyuz capsule. (AP Photo/NASA, Bill Ingalls)