Progress MS-04 cargo craft was en route to resupply International Space Station when it broke up in atmosphere and fell to Earth

An unmanned Russian cargo spaceship has broken up in the atmosphere and crashed over Siberia en route to the International Space Station, according to Russia’s space agency.



Roscosmos said on Thursday that the Progress MS-04 cargo craft broke up at an altitude of 118 miles (190km) above the remote Russian Tuva region in Siberia, which borders Mongolia. Most of the debris burned up as it entered the atmosphere before crashing over what the space agency said was an uninhabited area.

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It earlier said it had lost contact with the Progress MS-04 383 seconds after it launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and that its specialists were looking into the problem. The space agency said the loss of the cargo ship would “not affect the normal operations of the ISS systems and the subsistence of the station’s crew”. Nasa meanwhile said on its website that supplies at the space laboratory were “at good levels”.

The cargo ship, which had been scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Saturday, was carrying 2.4 tonnes of fuel, food and equipment when it took off from Baikonur, according to Roscosmos. The agency said a state commission would investigate the incident but did not say whether it would affect future launches.

It was the second failure of a Progress cargo craft in less than two years. In April 2015 a Progress vehicle disintegrated as it fell to Earth, a failure Russia blamed on a problem with a Soyuz rocket. The incident led to Russia putting all space travel on hold for nearly three months and forced a group of astronauts to spend an extra month on the ISS.

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

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Progress resupply vehicle approaching the ISS. Photograph: AP

Russia sends three or four such spacecraft a year to supply the ISS. After making their delivery, they plummet back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean.

Last month the Frenchman Thomas Pesquet, the Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky and the American astronaut Peggy Whitson were sent to the ISS for a six-month mission.

The mission followed that of the Russians Andrei Borisenko and Sergei Ryzhikov and the American Shane Kimbrough in October, which was pushed back by nearly a month due to technical issues.

Technical mishaps have complicated plans to extend the periods during which the ISS is fully staffed with six astronauts. Russia’s Soyuz capsules offer the only way for manned missions to reach the space station since the US space shuttle programme was retired in 2011.

The space laboratory, where a range of research is carried out, has been orbiting the Earth at about 17,000 mph (28,000 km/h) since 1998.