MOSCOW—A rocket carrying two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut to the International Space Station has blasted off successfully.

The Soyuz booster blasted off as scheduled Wednesday from the Russia-leased Baikonur launchpad in Kazakhstan. It’s carrying NASA astronauts Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold, and Roscosmos’ cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev. The rocket put their Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft in a designated orbit en route to the station. The spacecraft is set to dock at the orbiting outpost on Friday.

The trio will join Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos, Scott Tingle of NASA and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who are on the station.

Andrew “Drew” Feustel, who was born in Michigan and has Canada-U.S. citizenship, met his future wife, Indira, a speech pathologist from eastern Ontario, at Indiana’s Purdue University. They married and came to Canada, and Queen’s University says he completed a PhD in geological sciences at the university in Kingston, Ont., in the 1990s. The Queen’s Gazette says their two children Ari and Aden, were born in Kingston and that the family still has ties to the city.

It will be Feustel’s third flight into space, and his second to the space station where he will also take over as commander in June.

In a recent Facebook posting, Feustel said his two boys were both born on the same date two years apart: April 26.

A NASA astronaut biography says Feustel began his astronaut training when he reported to the Johnson Space Center in Houston in August 2000.

With files from the Canadian Press