3 crew members en route to the International Space Station

British astronaut Tim Peake is on his way to the International Space Station.

Major Peake entered the station with a huge smile on his face as the full crew of six joined in front of the camera to listen to congratulatory messages from family members and space travel experts watching from the ESA in Baikonur.

Upon arrival, Major Peake and his crew will spend six months performing a variety of experiments and tests for researchers. Image copyright Reuters Image caption Photographers gathered to capture the moment the rocket blasted off. Image copyright @ESAoperations Image caption On Twitter, the European Space Agency posted a picture of Maj Peake “as he hurtles upwards”.

The trio has been on the space station since March 2015 and are set to return to earth on Soyuz TMA-18M on the March 1, 2016.

The other three astronauts now living on the orbiting worldwide space laboratory are commander Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov.

The otherwise smooth journey ended with a slightly delayed docking at 6.33 am, NZ time, as Russian commander Yuri Malenchenko aborted the automatic procedure and manually guided the spacecraft toward the station.

The researchers working aboard the International Space Station are about to get some relief.

Major Peake, 43, was selected by the European Space Agency from a pool of 8,000 applicants in 2009 to become the first British-funded astronaut to live and work on the ISS.

The Russian Soyuz TMA-19 capsule docked at 5:33pm GMT, six-and-a-half hours after lift-off at 11:03am GMT.

It was more than two hours later before the astronauts were able to successfully board the ISS.

He also plans to run the London Marathon while on the space station, by strapping himself to a treadmill and running at the same time as the participants on planet Earth begin running on April 24th next year.

On its final approach the Soyuz capsule had a maximum speed of 30cm per second and finally docked with the floating capsule at approximately 17:34PM.

The landing wrapped up a space mission that lasted 141 days and returned samples from several NASA human research experiments aboard the station.