Time-lapse: Watch the Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 roll to the launch pad (members only)

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two cosmonauts and a NASA shuttle veteran blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Wednesday and set off after the International Space Station.

Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL rocket will take about 11 minutes to place NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, satellite into a roughly 357-mile-high (575-kilometer) orbit after an airborne launch off Florida’s east coast.

NASA’s last space shuttle commander — former U.S. Navy fighter pilot Chris Ferguson — will fly Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule on its first piloted test mission to the International Space Station next year.