Russian supply ship launched to International Space Station

MOSCOW – An unmanned Russian cargo ship lifted off successfully Wednesday on a supply mission to the International Space Station.

A Soyuz-U booster rocket carrying the Progress MS-05 spacecraft blasted off as scheduled at 11:58 a.m. (0558 GMT) from the Russian-leased Baikonur launch complex in Kazakhstan.

The mission follows the Dec. 1 botched launch of the previous Progress ship, which crashed less than 7 minutes after liftoff, spraying fiery debris over a sparsely populated area in southern Siberia near the border with Mongolia.

An official Russian investigation concluded that the failed launch was caused by a manufacturing flaw in the Soyuz booster’s third-stage engine.

Prior to Wednesday’s launch, space officials ran rigorous checks of the engines already built and conducted a comprehensive scrutiny of manufacturing facilities.

The launch went on without a hitch and the spacecraft entered a designated preliminary orbit en route to the space outpost. It’s set to dock at the station Friday following another batch of supplies arriving later Wednesday, when a Dragon supply ship launched Sunday by SpaceX is set to arrive at the station.

The station is currently inhabited by NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson, Andrei Borisenko, Sergei Ryzhikov and Oleg Novitskiy of Russia, and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet.