Space freighter burns up after launch to ISS

An unmanned cargo ship traveling to the International Space Station ( ISS) burned up in the atmosphere shortly after launch on Thursday, Russia’s space agency said.

“According to preliminary information, as a result of an abnormal situation, the cargo ship’s loss occurred some 190 kilometers [110 miles] above the remote, unpopulated mountainous territory of [Russia’s] Tuva region, and most fragments burned up in dense layers of the atmosphere,” the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities said in a statement.

Roscosmos said earlier on Thursday that it had lost contact with the Progress MS-04 383 seconds after launch from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The failure was being investigated.

The agency said the loss will “not affect the ISS system’s normal operations and the subsistence of the station’s crew”.

NASA, meanwhile, said on its website that supplies at the space laboratory are “at good levels.”

The cargo ship, which had been scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Saturday, was carrying 2.4 tons of fuel, food and equipment when it took off, Roscosmos said.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who launched to the ISS for a six-month mission in November, enough supplies.

“We can last many months up here without supplies because we recycle as much as possible and have many spares,” Pesquet wrote on his Facebook page. “Spaceflight is international teamwork and some setbacks are always expected!”

Pesquet added that a cargo ship from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was set to arrive on December 9.

The Russian agency said a state commission would probe the failure but did not say whether future launches would be affected.

In April 2015, a failed Progress launch was blamed on a problem with a Soyuz rocket.

Russia put all space travel on hold for nearly three months, and a group of astronauts had to spend an extra month on the ISS.

Russia said at the time that because the same type of rocket is used for manned ships, all issues with Progress resupply missions needed to be thoroughly investigated before any manned vessels could be launched.