There was no stop and smell the roses for veteran Russian commander Oleg Kotov and newbies Sergey Ryazanskiy of Russia and Michael Hopkins of the United States as they journeyed to the International Space Station. The crew launched in a Russian Soyuz rocket at 4:58 p.m. EDT and was expected to reach the outpost, which orbits 250 miles above Earth, in just under six hours—the third fastest journey so far.

The addition of Ryazasnkiy, Kotov and Hopkins will complete the station’s original team number of six crewmembers, which was manned by just Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano since 10. The crew has been put in charge of overseeing the arrival of a commercial cargo ship that launched on September 18 from a new launch pad on the Virginia Coast. The Cygnus ship was expected to arrive this week; however, a software problem has rendered the freighter unable to receive navigation data. Now with Soyuz’s berthing at the Space Station, the landing of the freighter is delayed to avoid any conflict between the spacecraft dockings.

However, the team remains excited about the mission. “As a crew we’re very excited to be up there when Cygnus rendezvous and docks and (we’re) looking forward to opening that hatch,” Hopkins said on Tuesday during a prelaunch press conference. This is the first mission for both Hopkins and Ryazanskiy, who will spend the next five months aboard the International Space Station.

With the winter Olympics starting in February 2014, both Hopkins and Ryazanskiy may be most excited for their first of three scheduled space walks. The pair plans to take an unlighted Olympic torch outside the airlock to promote the Sochi Olympic Games, which will be held in Russia.

“Our goal here is to make it look spectacular,” Kotov, speaking through a translator, told reporters. “We’d like to showcase our Olympic torch in space. We will try to do it in a beautiful manner. Millions of people will see it live on TV and they will see the station and see how we work.”

The torch should make it to the station on November 6, and Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano will bring it back to Earth when they return home four days later so the torch relay can continue.

This will be the third time the Olympic torch (though not the flame) will have been taken into outer space. NASA’s now-retired space shuttle Atlantis carried the Olympic torch before the 1996 Olympics and then the torch was sent again in 2000.