Russian cargo ship delivers long-awaited supplies to Space Station

The successful delivery of cargo by the Russian Progress spacecraft comes a week after the failed launch of the American SpaceX CRS-7 Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon cargo ship with supplies for the ISS.

Sunday’s success came a week after a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded after launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft was carrying propellant, oxygen, water, food and science experiments.

‘All of the systems on the Progress (are) in excellent shape, ‘ said NASA launch commentator Rob Navias during a NASA TV broadcast of the launch.

Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko and United States astronaut Scott Kelly are part of Expedition 44 now in space, to be joined by three more people some time later this month. But the company’s Cygnus spacecraft is scheduled to launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in late 2015.

The global Space Station was flying about 249 miles over northwestern Sudan, near the border with Egypt and Libya, at the moment of liftoff. In October a year ago, another attempt, by U.S.-based Orbital Sciences, also ended in failure.

A final report on that accident is still pending, said Orbital spokesman Barry Beneski.

Scientists have not yet found out the reason behind the SpaceX failure, but Russian engineers said earlier in a statement that they had identified and corrected the problem believed to be responsible for the Progress mishap and there were no problems of any significance with the M-28M/60P vehicle. It was unclear what caused the rocket to fail, but a Federal Aviation Administration investigation is underway. The ship arrived at the global Space Station after a series of high-profile failures that have delayed the next manned flight to the orbiting outpost.

Russian officials decided to move up the launch by about a month from its originally planned launch date in August in order to restock the station crew with critically needed supplies as soon as practical.

The unpiloted spacecraft’s mounting apparatus pledged another exchange among the station’s Earth-facing Pirs lodge at at least three:11 a.m. EDT (GMT-4), this situation was 48 hours after initiate from the originial and Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.