Video images from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Monday showed the Soyuz astronauts in blue parkas on their way to board the rocket as snowflakes swirled in a blustery wind. The white snowscape around the launch pad briefly glowed bright orange as the countdown hit zero, the boosters fired and the gray rocket quickly accelerated to more than 3,000 miles per hour for a smooth launch into space.

In the capsule’s close quarters, the astronauts had hung a stuffed Angry Bird toy — a character from the video game. For the first two minutes and six seconds of the flight, the red bird could be seen hanging straight down, demonstrating the pull of Earth’s gravity. Then, as the manned capsule separated from the rocket booster, the bird started to bob upward. “As you can see from the Angry Bird floating up above Shkaplerov,” an announcer narrated helpfully on NASA-TV, “the crew has reached orbit.”

Mr. Burbank, a space flight veteran, will take charge of the space station, and the current commander, Michael Fossum, an American, and two flight engineers, Satoshi Furukawa of Japan and Sergei Volkov of Russia, are scheduled to return to Earth on Nov. 22. Another crew of three astronauts is scheduled to travel to the space station on Dec. 21.

In addition to carrying out dozens of scientific experiments, the newly arrived space station team will inaugurate the new era of commercial space expeditions, including the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., known as SpaceX, to deliver supplies to the station using a reusable capsule called a Dragon.

Another commercial resupply ship being built by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., is expected to make the trip to the station next year, NASA said.