This morning at 8:16 a.m. ET, a trio of astronauts rocketed into the sky onboard a Soyuz TMA spacecraft, starting a two day trip to dock with the International Space Station on Friday morning. Once onboard, the new crew will bring ISS staffing back up to six people – the necessary number to get about 40 hours per week of human-tended research out of the $100 billion facility.

Expedition 30 crew members NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit, Russian Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko and European Space Agency Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers of the Netherlands launched from a frigid (4 degrees F, 8 degrees of wind chill) (Note to NASA: Yet another reason to get commercial crew transport running in Florida) and snow covered Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 7:16 a.m. local time.

The trio is expected to dock with ISS at about 10:22 a.m. ET on Friday, joining Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin aboard the station when they open the hatches about 1 p.m. 

Normal crew rotation to ISS was disrupted by the failure of an unmanned Russian Progress supply mission. Since Progress and manned Soyuz missions use the same Soyuz rocket, all Russian cargo and crew flights to ISS were halted until the failure of the Soyuz could be identified and fixed, then tested with a couple of unmanned flights before resuming manned missions.

Due to delays in resuming manned flights and the on-orbit time of the previously launched Soyuz capsule docked at the station, ISS has been operating understaffed with a three man crew since late November. 

A more normal crew rotation will take place in March, with a new three man crew launched to ISS and Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin returning to Earth, closing out Expedition 30 and starting Expedition 31. Pettit, Kononenko and Kuipers will remain on the station until May.

A full six man crew now sets the stage for a SpaceX Dragon commercial supply demonstration flight in February and an Orbital Sciences (News - Alert) Corporation Cygnus/Antares (formerly Taurus II) commercial supply demonstration flight in the first half of 2012. Successful completion of the demonstration missions would inaugurate U.S. commercial supply runs to ISS, acting as a replacement for the Space Shuttle's role in delivering consumables and experiments to the space station.  

Both companies have cranked up their hardware production lines in anticipation of successful demonstration flights; successful demos enable them to start fulfilling on paying contracts to deliver supplies to ISS.