Russian Cargo Craft Brings Supplies to Space Station

A Russian cargo craft docked at the international space station on Tuesday, bringing vital fuel and food to an outpost and crew suddenly cut off from a major supply line after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia.

Maneuvering on autopilot, the unmanned Progress M-47 cargo ship moored itself to the station at 6:49 a.m. PST. It lifted off atop a Soyuz-U rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sunday.

Russian space officials said the docking, visible on a giant screen at mission control outside Moscow, went smoothly.

The Progress brought about 2.75 tons of fuel as well as water, food and other supplies for U.S. astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin.

U.S. shuttles were grounded indefinitely after Saturday’s Columbia disaster. The supply mission came as officials from the United States, Russia and other partners in the 16-nation space station project are discussing how to run the orbiting complex amid the break in supplies.

NASA plans had called for expanding the station during five shuttle flights this year, but the plans have been put on hold pending the investigation into the cause of the disaster. Shuttles can carry payloads of 110 tons, while Russian Progress supply ships carry no more than 2.75 tons and usually less.

Shuttles also have helped maintain the station’s orbit by firing their engines and delivered bulky cargoes needed for the station’s expansion.

The Columbia disaster has sparked fears in Russia that NASA may decide to suspend work on the station and leave it temporarily unmanned -- a prospect that would leave Moscow without any manned space program of its own for the first time since it put the first man into space in 1961.

“We must do everything to prevent the collapse of the international space station project, which is the accomplishment of the entire mankind,” Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Tuesday.