Watch a Japanese rocket launch with supplies for the international Space Station

They are reportedly delaying the launch from their Space Center in southern Japan due to an unfavorable weather forecast at the launch site until Wednesday, which may still be delayed even further.

The launch is scheduled for 7:50AM ET today, with live coverage of the event beginning at 7:00AM ET.

Several previous supply launches failed, and Scott Kelly, one of two Americans aboard the international Space Station, said in an interview with CBS earlier this week that the launch was “pretty important”. The rocket carried a 5.5-tonne cargo vessel called “kounotori” in Japanese, which contains supplies including clothing, water, food, and tools necessary for experiments to be done in space. In less than a year, the accident was the third involving Russian and US supply ships bound for the international Space Station.

This delivery marks the fifth time that an HTV vehicle has delivered supplies to the ISS.

Orbital is planning to fly its next Cygnus cargo capsule in December aboard an Atlas 5 rocket purchased from United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Also aboard the Japanese freighter are 14 tiny cubesats built by San Francisco-based company Planet Labs, which aims to provide low-cost but high-resolution Earth imagery to a variety of customers. The CALET official website describes the telescope as a joint operation between Japanese, US, and Italian universities hoping to study such things as the signatures of dark matter, the gamma ray spectrum, and particle propagation in the galaxy.

A refrigerator-sized rack designed to host future small plug-and-play research payloads will also be transferred over to the space station from the HTV’s cargo compartment. Within its unpressurized cargo bay, HTV-5 will be carrying waste materials and other items, such as the Multi-mission Consolidated Equipment (MCE), the Superconducting Submillimeter-Wave Limb-Emission Sounder (SMILES), and a NASA experiment module Space Test Program Houston 4 (STP-H4).

After its cargo is unloaded, the HTV-5 will be sent off to burn up on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.