Three astronauts blasted off into the early morning sky in an upgraded Soyuz spacecraft from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome, heading towards the International Space Station. First-time astronauts Kathleen Rubins of Nasa and Takuya Onishi of the Japanese space agency set off for a four-month mission at the ISS with Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin. Footage also showed Ivanishin and Onishi giving each other fist bumps to celebrate the successful launch.

Features of the new Soyuz series include upgraded boosters, an improved navigation system, strengthened shielding from debris and more cells on the craft’s solar panels. The trio’s launch was delayed by two weeks as Russian space officials carried out further software tests on the modified vehicle. The craft’s journey to dock at the ISS will take two days – longer than the usual six-hour flight – to give ground control more time to monitor the tweaked system’s performance.

Nasa’s Kate Rubins will be the first woman aboard the ISS since Italian Samantha Cristoforetti returned to earth with the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman (199 days) in June last year. The molecular biologist-turned astronaut will also become the first person to sequence DNA in space during her mission.

The ISS space laboratory has been orbiting Earth at about 28,000 kilometres per hour (17,400 miles per hour) since 1998. Space travel has been one of the few areas of international cooperation between Russia and the West that has not been wrecked by geopolitical tensions over Ukraine.