Soyuz Spacecraft Makes Six Hour Flight to ISS, Fastest Ever Recorded [VIDEO]

A new Russian-American crew arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) Friday after a fast-track trip from Earth which lasted under six hours and carried three astronauts.

A NASA astronaut, Chris Cassidy, and two Russian cosmonauts, Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin, arrived in the Soyuz-TMA spaceship and floated into the ISS to greet the other three astronauts that are already stationed there.  The incoming crew will spend five months in space before returning to Earth.

"It's such a beautiful sight, hard to believe my eyes," the 59-year-old Vinogradov, who had been in space in 1997 and 2006, was heard saying on NASA TV, according to a live broadcast on Russian TV.

This is the fastest trip from blast-off at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to docking with the ISS lasted less than six hours, slashing the usual travel time by some 45 hours.

Mike Suffredini, NASA's International Space Station program manager said in a statement, "The four-orbit rendezvous has the advantage of a very short period of time from launch to docking."

"It reduces the amount of time the crew has to spend in a small environment before they get to ISS," he added. The crew said they feel the shorter flight time will make them less fatigued and improve the performance of biomedical experiments.

According to NASA this is the third space mission for Vinogradov, a former design engineer. Misurkin, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Russian Air Force, is making his first spaceflight and Cassidy, a commander in the U.S. Navy, is making his second spaceflight.