Russian rocket blasts off to space outpost

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts on board blasted off from Kazakhstan on Monday to join a U.S.-Russian duo manning the International Space Station (ISS). Russian Oleg Kotov, NASA's Timothy Creamer and Japan's Soichi Noguchi lifted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as planned, at 0052 Moscow time (4:52 p.m. EST on Sunday). "Attention, spaceship Soyuz TMA-17, successfully reached its designated orbit," said an announcer at mission control to the applause of control workers and officials from the Russian, U.S. and Japanese space agencies.