Three astronauts arrived at the International Space Station Friday to begin a five-month stay, the Associated Press reported. The addition of the Russian, American and Dutchman restored the crew to six members for the first time since September.

The three astronauts were mission commander Oleg Kononenko, NASA's Don Pettit and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers. They traveled in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for two days, blasting off from Baikonur, the Russian-operated cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The same day, an unmanned, newer version of the Soyuz crashed in Siberia after being launched from Russia's Plesetsk cosmodrome. Its mission was to put a communications satellite into orbit. It didn't reach orbit after a third-stage engine failure, Reuters reported. It was the fifth failed Russian launch this year.

The trio of astronauts joins NASA's Dan Burbank and Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin who arrived on the space station in November.

The International Space Station is a $100 billion research complex that orbits Earth, according to Reuters.

The crew will work together until mid-March.

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