Three astronauts who will join the International Space Station crew were launched into orbit at 0415 GMT Monday morning from the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and are expected to arrive at the orbiting outpost Wednesday.

NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin were launched aboard a Russian-built Soyuz rocket, and are scheduled to join the rest of the station's Expedition 29 crew composed of NASA Commander Mike Fossum, Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov.

NASA said the six crewmen will be busy with dozens of experiments during their time aboard the station. Within four days, Fossum will hand over command of the station to the new crew.

Launched in June, Fossum, Furukawa and Volkov are scheduled to return to Earth in their Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft on Nov. 22 after a formal change of command ceremony Nov. 20.

Expedition 30 begins when the current crew undocks with Burbank in command. They will be joined later by NASA astronaut Don Pettit, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers who are scheduled to launch to the station on Dec. 21 as flight engineers.

At the station, Expedition 30 is expected to greet the arrival of Dragon, a commercial resupply ship being built by SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., which will perform a test flight.

Another commercial resupply ship, Cygnus, is scheduled to follow in time for Expedition 31. Cygnus is being built by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va.