Russian Rocket delivers Supplies to ISS after Orbital and SpaceX failures

The cargo ship, which is carrying more than 6 tons of supplies, has now reached its destination and touched down at the global Space Station.

While such missions are fairly routine, past spacecraft resupply attempts have failed, making this one especially crucial.

The accident destroyed a Dragon capsule carrying about 5,000 pounds of food, science experiments and equipment, including a docking system for two new space taxis under development by SpaceX and Boeing.

The space station is fairly well stocked despite these back-to-back mishaps: It had enough supplies to support crewmembers through October before Progress 60’s arrival, NASA officials said in the wake of the Falcon 9 explosion.

The problem was a glitch on the carrier Proton-M rocket, similar to an incident past year when the same model of rocket fell to Earth carrying Russia’s most advanced communications satellite.

Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, switched this Progress vehicle to an older version of the Soyuz rocket which had a different third stage configuration that was not involved in the April failure.

Among the lost equipment was a docking adaptor – the first of its kind – that would allow commercial crew vehicles to dock with the station in the future.

“The space station crew is fine on orbit”, NASA’s William Gerstenmaier said. “They’ve done a tremendous job of balancing all the consumables on orbit”.

Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko of Russian Federation and NASA’s Scott Kelly – had been awaiting SpaceX’s shipment.

“Even without processed water, we have enough water supplies on orbit until late 2015”, NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz said. They’re living on the space station for about a year to explore the effects of long-term space flight on the human body.

Three new crew members are expected to arrive aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on July 22, which will then bring home three of the current crew members. It circles the planet every 90 minutes. It was just after midnight, Friday, June 3 on the USA east coast, but judging from Twitter, a larger-than-average contingent of the spaceflight community was watching live on NASA TV.