MOSCOW, August 2 (RIA Novosti) - A Soyuz-U booster rocket with a Progress M-61 cargo vehicle carrying repair equipment to the International Space Station (ISS) has been launched from the Baikonur space center, a Russian Mission Control spokesman said.
"The launch of the cargo spaceship marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founder of cosmonautics," the spokesman said Thursday.
The Progress M-61 spacecraft, named after Tsiolkovsky, should deliver on August 5 extra tools to repair laptops on the ISS, which reported a glitch on the night of June 12.
The computer failure, which experts believe was caused by changes in the ISS configuration after new solar arrays were connected, disabled the steering system on the Russian segment of the orbital station. The ISS crew restarted the laptops in suspended mode with the help of the Atlantis shuttle, sent to the station to fix the failure.
