The Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft with American Loral O’Hara and Russians Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on board is due to dock at the ISS at 2.56am.

They will join the current crew of Nasa astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Frank Rubio, Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin, Konstantin Borisov and Sergei Prokopyev, as well as Denmark’s Andreas Mogensen and Japan’s Satoshi Furukawa.

O’Hara and Chub are on their first spaceflight, and Kononenko on his fifth.

Russia’s space programme suffered a major setback last month when its Luna-25 spacecraft crashed during an attempt to land near the south pole of the moon in the first Russian lunar mission for 47 years.

The ISS is one of the few international projects on which the US and Russia still cooperate closely. Relations in other areas have virtually broken down since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to which Washington responded by arming Kyiv and imposing successive rounds of sanctions on Moscow.