A multinational crew, including a US astronaut who is the oldest and most experienced woman to fly in space, blasted off from Kazakhstan for the International Space Station, where it should arrive in two days, a NASA TV broadcast showed.

The Russian Soyuz rocket carrying American Peggy Whitson, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 8.20pm GMT yesterday, 2.20am Baikonur time.

Whitson, 56, a biochemist and Nasa's former chief astronaut, is making her third trip to the station, a $100 million research laboratory that flies about 420 km above Earth.

By the time she returns to Earth in six months, she will have accumulated more time in orbit than any other US astronaut, surpassing the 534-day record set in September by astronaut Jeff Williams.

Novitskiy, 45, is making his second spaceflight.

The crew is due to reach the station at 10.01pm GMT on Saturday, where it will be greeted by Nasa astronaut Shane Kimbrough and Russian flight engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, who arrived on October 21.

The combined crew will be one of the last six-member teams to live on the station for a while. Beginning in March, Russia plans to cut the number of cosmonauts serving on the station to two from three, following delays in launching a new science laboratory. The Multipurpose Laboratory Module is now expected to be launched in 2018.

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