A Russian rocket docked late Tuesday with the International Space Station, bringing two space veterans and a rookie astronaut one step closer to a long stay orbiting the Earth. The three -- Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, American astronaut Karen Nyberg and Italian Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency -- will spend the next six months at the space station until their scheduled departure in mid-November. The Soyuz capsule carrying them into orbit lifted off at 2:31 a.m. Wednesday (4:31 p.m. ET Tuesday) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a nearly six-hour flight to the station. Once inside the space station, they will join Chris Cassidy of NASA and Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, who have been in the orbiter since March, according to a report of CNN.
