A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three fresh crewmembers to the International Space Station (ISS) has successfully taken off and docked.

According to the Associated Press, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, Russian cosmonaut Max Surayev and Alexander Gerst, a German astronaut of the European Space Agency, arrived at the ISS at 9:44 p.m. EDT Wednesday night.

Wiseman is a veteran Navy carrier pilot making his first spaceflight, as is Gerst, who holds a doctorate in geophysics. Surayev was the rocket's commander and oversaw the automated docking process.

The fresh crewmembers are replacing the three that recently landed in Kazakhstan multiple weeks ago.

The crewmembers took off from Moscow and began their six-hour flight smoothly and four minutes in, the first stage boosters detached and fell away as planned. The rocket entered and ended its second and third stages just as smoothly and nearly 10 minutes into the flight, the astronauts were flying it on their own.

The rest of the flight went without hiccups, meeting every last carefully timed rocket burst and docking near-perfectly on time. After checking for air leaks in the docking station, on-board ISS crewmembers Steven Swanson, Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev opened the hatch and welcomed in the Soyuz rocket.

"If we can something like that, then my time is well spent," Wiseman told CBS News before the launch. "But the first thing I want to do when I get there, I've got to give Swanny a big hug, and then it's time to go look out the window."

A rookie on the ISS, Wiseman said what he is looking forward to in his tour on the low-orbit space station will be "floating, the view, and the chance to do some science that maybe not now, but maybe 10 of 15 years down the road helps save somebody's life."

The ISS is an international collaboration of several different space agencies, ultimately led by the U.S. and Russia, the world's leaders in the space industry. Despite certain tensions between the two nations, the ISS has been able to function as well as ever.

"Our team, our crew is not just a team of three different guys from three different nationalities or continents," Gerst said at a pre-launch news conference. "We're actually a group of friends."