A NASA astronaut and his two Russian crewmates made the fastest-ever trip to the International Space Station on Thursday, arriving less than six hours after launch.

In the past, it's taken two days for Soyuz spaceships to make the trip from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. But mission planners worked out a more efficient procedure that made it possible for the Soyuz to catch up with the station in just four orbits, compared with more than 30 orbits under the previous flight plan.

Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin, along with NASA's Chris Cassidy, rocketed into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:43 p.m. ET Thursday (2:43 a.m. Friday local time). "The spacecraft is nominal, we feel great," Vinogradov, the spacecraft's commander, reported as the rocket ascended to orbit.

NASA launch commentator Josh Byerly hailed Thursday's flight, saying that the crew was "on the fast track" to the station.

The six-hour trip lasted roughly as long as an airplane flight from Seattle to Miami. NASA officials say the fast-rendezvous procedure minimizes the time that crew members spend in the Soyuz's close quarters and gets them to the much roomier space station in better shape. The down side is that the three spacefliers had to spend most of the trip sitting elbow to elbow in bulky spacesuits — which might strike a familiar chord for Seattle-to-Miami fliers.

The fast-track technique relies on a complicated round of orbital choreography that was tested three times over the past eight months, using unmanned Russian Progress cargo ships.

Last week, the space station raised its orbit by about a mile and a half (2.5 kilometers) to put it in the correct position for intercepting the Soyuz. The Soyuz had to be launched at just the right moment, to get into just the right orbit at just the right distance behind the station. To catch up with the station at the right time, the Soyuz had to execute a precisely timed series of thruster firings — a task that was made easier by an upgrade to the spacecraft's automated navigation system.

"From a technical point of view, we feel pretty comfortable with this," Cassidy said at a pre-launch news briefing. "All of the procedures are very similar to what we do in a two-day process, and we've trained it a number of times."

Despite all the training, there were some nail-biting moments. At one point during the Soyuz's approach, a Russian mission controller told Vinogradov, "You really need to stay calm and cool." Vinogradov followed through on the advice, guiding the Soyuz to its targeted position at 10:28 p.m. ET.

Two hours after docking, the hatches between the two spacecraft were opened, and the Soyuz trio floated through to greet three other spacefliers who have been living aboard the station since December: Canadian commander Chris Hadfield, NASA's Tom Marshburn and Russia's Roman Romanenko.

"Hey, is anyone home?" Vinogradov joked. The new arrivals received a round of hugs and congratulations, exchanged warm words with loved ones back on Earth via the station's communication link, and finally settled down for rest at the end of a long, long day.

Vinogradov has been on two previous long-duration space missions — to Russia's Mir space station in 1997-1998, and to the International Space Station in 2006. Cassidy, a Navy SEAL, has been to the station once before, during a mission on the shuttle Endeavour in 2009. This is the first spaceflight for Misurkin.

The new crew members will spend five and a half months aboard the orbital outpost. They'll take part in station upkeep as well as scores of scientific experiments. Up to seven spacewalks are planned during their stay, with the first one coming up next month. The next changing of the guard comes in mid-May, when Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko are due to return to Earth.

More about the Soyuz trip:

• Space station shifts orbit for fast trip
• Space trip offers speed, but not comfort
• Fast trip to station is like riding a train

This report includes information from The Associated Press.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:47 PM EDT

Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight

Software billionaire Charles Simonyi peeks inside the Soyuz spacecraft he purchased and is now lending to the Museum of Flight in Seattle. The Soyuz TMA-14, which Simonyi rode into space in 2009, was shipped from Russia and was unpacked at the museum on Friday.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft that carried a billionaire into orbit — and ended up being purchased by the billionaire — was settled into its new home in Seattle's Museum of Flight on Friday after a whirlwind intercontinental trip.

Software executive Charles Simonyi was on hand for the arrival of the Soyuz TMA-14 descent module, which took him into space along with a NASA astronaut and Russian cosmonaut in March 2009. That launch marked Simonyi's second trip to the International Space Station, for which he paid an estimated $35 million.

Simonyi rode back down to Earth on a different three-seat Soyuz at the end of his 13-day space trip. The TMA-14 remained docked to the station until the next departure, six months later. After it landed, Simonyi had the opportunity to buy the spacecraft from the Russians, and he took it. Although the purchase price was not disclosed, it was probably more than $1 million and less than the $3 million that Simonyi donated to the Museum of Flight for its new Space Gallery.

The Soyuz was crated up and flown to Chicago on a Russian transport plane, then loaded onto a truck for the 2½-day drive to Seattle, museum curator Dan Hagedorn told me. "It made a record transit out here," he said.

In a statement issued by the museum, Simonyi said he hoped the exhibit "will inspire the next generation of space explorers."

Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight

The Soyuz TMA-14 sits on its shipping pallet inside the Museum of Flight's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery.

Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight

The Soyuz spacecraft is designed to be operated by the commander in the center seat of the three-seat descent module, as you can see from this interior view of the Soyuz TMA-14.

Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight

Software executive Charles Simonyi shakes hands with Dan Hagedorn, curator of the Museum of Flight, marking the formal acceptance of Simonyi's loan of the Soyuz to the Seattle museum. The video below, from The Seattle Times, provides a 360-degree view of the Soyuz.

As I noted in December, when the Space Gallery opened its doors, this isn't the first slightly used Soyuz capsule to be purchased by a passenger: An earlier spaceflight participant, New Jersey inventor/entrepreneur Greg Olsen, also bought his Soyuz and had it put on display at New York's Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Another one of Simonyi's space acquisitions may be more precedent-setting: a working space toilet from Russia.

Shuttle mockup on the way
Eventually, the space toilet and the Soyuz will be joined in the 15,500-square-foot Charles Simonyi Space Gallery by the museum's piece de resistance: a full-scale mockup of the space shuttle's fuselage. Astronauts at Johnson Space Center used the full-fuselage trainer to familiarize themselves with the shuttle's interior, and when the shuttle fleet was retired, NASA awarded the 120-foot-long mockup to the Museum of Flight.

The shuttle stand-in is due to be shipped up to Seattle in pieces, starting in May. "It'll be coming in on the massive Super Guppy, which is going to be an event in itself," Hagedorn said. "We think by the end of July it'll be fully assembled."

Visitors will be able to walk through the mockup's cargo bay, but access to the crew compartment and the cockpit will be provided only "on a very limited basis" because the quarters are so tight, Hagedorn said. Despite those limits, visitors will almost certainly be able to go places they could never go in the shuttles that flew in space, which will be put on display at museums in Florida, California and "the other Washington."

Hagedorn, who is 65 years old, sounded like a kid as he talked about the Soyuz and the full-fuselage trainer. "They're the cat's meow," he said. "I tell people I have the best job in the world."

More about space artifacts:

• Russian spacecraft heading for Seattle
• Seattle museum gets 'keys' to shuttle trainer
• The real dirt about the Soyuz space toilet
• Shuttles' future homes: Fla., Calif., D.C., N.Y.

Simonyi is the founder of Intentional Software. Microsoft, where Simonyi used to work, is a partner along with NBC Universal in the msnbc.com joint venture. I helped prepare a mission pamphlet for Simonyi's first spaceflight in 2007 as a freelance project.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA file

A Russian Soyuz craft leaves the International Space Station with three crew members in November 2010.

Russian space officials are hailing the end of the space shuttle era as the beginning of the "Soyuz epoch." For at least the next few years, Russian Soyuz craft will serve as the only way to get back and forth from the International Space Station, and NASA will be paying up to $63 million a seat for the ride.

Russian cosmonauts will also make up half of the space station's crews from here on out, even though NASA has paid most of the estimated $100 billion cost of construction.

The Soyuz epoch was heralded on Thursday by the Russian Federal Space Agency in a news release that also paid tribute to the shuttle era. The Russian-language report says that the shuttle fleet's retirement marks a "new stage in the International Space Station program, in which the Russian Soyuz spaceships have no backups."

The Russian space agency said it would be 2016 at the earliest before any other crew-capable spaceships are available for trips to the International Space Station. That's roughly what NASA is saying as well: Its current timetable calls for commercial space taxis such as the SpaceX Dragon, the Boeing CST-100, the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser or Blue Origin's orbital space vehicle to be ready for use sometime in the middle of the decade. 

Here's the way the Russians see the road ahead:

"For a 30-year period, the shuttles ensured not only access into space for humans, but also delivery into orbit of the large-scale payloads without which the building of the International Space Station would hardly have been possible. Humanity is indebted to the American ships for their role in the mastery of space.

"But really, why are the comfortable and beautiful 'birds' departing, while the 'old' Russian Soyuz spacecraft, as they are called by foreign media, are remaining?

"The answer is simple: reliability, to say nothing of profitability.

"The term 'old' has nothing in common with the reality. Soyuzes are constantly being modernized. Over the next year, newly modified ships equipped with digital systems will fly. The second Soyuz in the TMA-M series is currently undergoing flight design tests.

"Furthermore, even if there's an alternative to Russia's manned Soyuz spaceships in the next few years, it will take a lot of time to prove that the new ship will provide sufficient safety for human spaceflight.

"In the world of human spaceflight, today marks the beginning of the Soyuz epoch — the epoch of reliability."

NBC News space analyst James Oberg pointed out the announcement in an email. "Didn't take them long to start crowing, did it?" he wrote. "What happens next, I wonder?"

The space station crew composition already reflects an arrangement that ensures the Russians will never be outnumbered in orbit. The agreement for the 16-nation project calls for three crew members on each six-person expedition to come from the Russian space effort, with the other three representing the U.S. On-Orbit Segment, or USOS. That's shorthand for NASA plus the other partners, such as Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency. The current crew for Expedition 28, for example, includes three Russians, two Americans and a Japanese astronaut.

Until the commercial space taxis are ready, astronauts will have to fly to the station and back aboard the Soyuz craft, which are exempt from NASA's human-rating requirements. The current fare comes out to $48 million per seat, but NASA's agreements with the Russians call for that figure to rise to $51 million next year, $55.8 million for 2013-2014, and $62.7 million for 2014-2015.

'Full service' from Russia
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has pointed out repeatedly that the fare includes not only the ride itself, but also the required training at Russia's Star City cosmonaut complex. "It's not like a bus ticket or an airplane ticket," The Huntsville Times recently quoted Bolden as saying. "You used to be able to go into a gas station and get full service. ... We get full service from the Russians, old-time full service."

The way it works is that a Soyuz is sent up from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with a crew of three. That craft serves as the emergency lifeboat for the crew members until their six-month tour of duty is over and it's time to return to Earth. Then the Soyuz provides the ride home ... well, at least home to the Kazakh steppes and on to Moscow. The crew rotations are staggered by roughly three months, so one three-person Soyuz crew overlaps with another during the course of a 6-month-long expedition. Because the shuttles will no longer fly to the station, the crew count will vary between three and six, far less than the 13 who were on board during peak times in the shuttle era.

It's true that launching a Soyuz is considerably cheaper than launching a shuttle (which came out to $1 billion to $1.5 billion per mission). But the shuttle had much higher payload-carrying capability — up to 25 tons in the cargo bay. In comparison, the cargo capacity is 2.5 tons for Russia's unmanned Progress ship, 6 tons for Japan's HTV cargo carrier, 8 tons for Europe's expendable ATV, and 6 tons for SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule.

When it comes to flying astronauts, NASA is counting on the commercial taxis to outdo the Russians. "We believe we can come in at less than the cost to the Russians," one of the would-be taxi operators, Sierra Nevada's Mark Sirangelo, told me earlier this month. "We think substantially less."

And because the taxis are simpler than the shuttle, NASA expects them to improve on the shuttle fleet's safety record. Will they be better than the Soyuz? Oberg thinks the Soyuzes may be riskier than the Russians let on, but what do you think? Feel free to chime in with your comments below.

More about the future space race:

• Powerwall: Goodbye, shuttle ... Hello, Soyuz
• The shape of space shots to come
• Russia relishes chances created by shuttle's end
• Is America's space effort dying or evolving?
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA

NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman (left), Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev (middle), and European astronaut Paolo Nespoli (right), peer out from their Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft before their launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Problems reportedly bedeviled a communication link leading to Russia's Mission Control for a few hours today — leading to false alarms suggesting that there was trouble on the International Space Station, or on a Soyuz spacecraft that's on its way to the station. The glitch has been resolved and the crews are in no danger, but the snag caused a stir in press circles.

NBC News analyst James Oberg pieced together the story from Russian media reports as well as NASA sources who were keeping tabs on the station and the Soyuz. The alarm was sparked by a Novosti report claiming that Russian controllers were "without communication about the status of the International Space Station" and "haven't received any information about the status of the Soyuz."

That report was quickly picked up by Russia's Interfax news service, and that report was passed along in turn by Reuters. In the meantime, Novosti posted a revised report saying that the communication problem had been resolved. Later, Novosti and Interfax said the problem involved a fiber-optic network and lasted for several hours. Other reports suggested that a line between Mission Control and a military satellite control center had been cut.

It's not clear whether the disruption affected all of the primary and backup links to Russia's Mission Control Center, also known as the TsUP. There was "no indication of alarm" in the space communication traffic monitored by NASA, agency spokesman Josh Byerly told Oberg from Johnson Space Center.

Three astronauts are aboard the Soyuz: NASA's Catherine Coleman, Italy's Paolo Nespoli and Russia's Dmitry Kondratyev. They were launched on Wednesday from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and are on track to dock with the station on Friday.

The fact that Russia's Mission Control was having problems hearing from the space station as well as the Soyuz was a tip-off that the communication problem had an earthly cause. Here's what else Oberg had to say about today's incident:

"Had the problem only been in the Soyuz, it would have had much more serious implications. First, this particular spacecraft was involved in a railway collision while being transported to the launch site two months ago, and the entire crew cabin had to be replaced by the next-in-line module originally planned for a March 2011 launch. Hurrying its checkout schedule to launch 100 days sooner was a major stress on the workforce requiring three-shift operations. Under such conditions, one can assume the chances of human error go up.

"Also, without communications, the Soyuz always has the recourse of emergency landing back on Earth. For every circuit of the planet (16 per day) there is a pre-scripted landing point somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Problem is — most of those in Russia and Canada are currently enduring severe winter cold that would have made an emergency landing and rescue problematic.

"But no problem, it seems. This is just the kind of 'failure' that training directors make the crews in space and in Mission Control go through in practice, before launch. It's in keeping with an old maxim from General Suvorov, who beat Napoleon at Borodino in 1812 (beat him by not losing): 'Battle is easy, it's training that's hard.' Or as a Chinese general preached 2,000 years ago: 'The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war." As a veteran of both spaceflight training and real spaceflight operations at Mission Control in Houston, I can vouch for that attitude."

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).