A trio of American and Russian space travelers started successfully and attained the International Space Station

MOSCOW -- A trio of American and Russian space travelers started successfully and attained the International Space Station on Friday.

They docked in the station following a two-orbit travel that lasted just over three hours.

It's the second space assignment for Vande Hei and the third for Novitskiy, while Dubrov is about his very first assignment.

The launch arrived three times ahead of the 60th anniversary of the first human trip to distance by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and the 40th anniversary of the first launch of NASA's space shuttle.

"When we began, we had been competing with each other which was one reason we had been so powerful at the start of human space flight," Vande Hei said in a pre-flight news conference Thursday. "And as time went on, we understood that by working collectively we could achieve more. And needless to say, that is ongoing to this very day and I expect it is going to last in the future"

The three will operate on countless experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth sciencefiction.

Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov came in a Soyuz boat in October; Hopkins, Glover, Walker and Noguchi -- that the team of this SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience -- combined them in November.