| First British astronaut Tim Peake blasts off to the International Space Station on Soyuz rocket |
A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying a three-man international crew, including Britain's first professional astronaut Tim Peake, has blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Peake is accompanied by Russian space veteran Yury Malenchenko and Tim Kopra of NASA for a six-month mission for the for the European Space Agency (ESA).
Fire from the boosters of the Soyuz rocket cut a bright light through the overcast sky at the Russia-operated cosmodrome as the spacecraft launched on schedule at 5:00am Tuesday local time, according to live television broadcasts.
It successfully reached its designated orbit about nine minutes later.
A camera inside the capsule showed Peake pumping his fist as the rocket went into orbit.
The trip to the ISS is expected to take about six hours and will dock at around 4:25am (AEST).
Peake, 43, is a former army major and is the first Briton to go into space since Helen Sharman travelled on a Soviet spacecraft for eight days in 1991.
He is also the first astronaut officially representing the British Government and wearing a Union Jack flag on his arm.
While on board the ISS, he will take part in the London marathon by harnessing himself to a running machine 400 kilometres above Earth.
The ISS is a microgravity laboratory in which an international crew of six people live and work while orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes.
The station allows experts to test new technologies and research, not able to be tested on Earth.
The space station has been continuously occupied since November 2000. In that time, more than 200 people from 15 countries have visited.
Peake, Malenchenko and Kopra are set to return to Earth on June 5 next year.
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