Liftoff! Three space travellers including a NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts successfully launch on board a Soyuz MS-18 rocket to the International Space Station NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei is making his second trip to the ISS that's orbiting 254 miles above the Earth Cosmonauts Oleg Novitskly and Pyotr Dubrov join him in the Soyuz capsule that launched at 08:42 BST today They will orbit the Earth twice before docking with the nearly 20-foot-long 'Rassvet' module on the station