(Reuters) – Three Russian cosmonauts were launched on Friday on the way to the International Space Station (ISS) to continue a two-decade-plus shared Russian-U.S. presence aboard the orbiting outpost despite tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Soyuz spacecraft carrying the new cosmonaut team lifted off at about 1555 GMT (11:55 a.m. Eastern time) from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin a three-hour-plus ride to the space station.

Soyuz commander Oleg Artemyev led the team, joined by two spaceflight rookies, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, on a science mission set to last 6-1/2 months. The launch was carried live by NASA TV and on the U.S. space agency’s website.

About 2-1/2 hours into the flight, the Soyuz became visible from the space station as a tiny black dot gradually growing larger as it came closer, the NASA webcast showed.

The three cosmonauts will join the station’s current seven-member crew to replace three who are scheduled to fly back to Earth on March 30 – cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and U.S. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.

Vande Hei will have logged a NASA record-breaking 355 days in orbit by the time he returns to Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz capsule with his two cosmonaut peers.

Remaining aboard the ISS with the newcomers until the next rotation a couple months later are three NASA astronauts – Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron – and German crewmate Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency.

Those four crew members arrived together in November aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-month stint in orbit.

Launched in 1998, the research platform orbiting some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth has been continuously occupied since November 2000 while operated by a U.S.-Russian-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

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