An Antares rocket operated by Northrop Grumman lit up the night sky at 4:01 am (0901 GMT) as it propelled the craft loaded with 7,400 pounds (3,350 kilograms) of gear into space.
On Friday, a Russian Soyuz rocket launched its first cargo mission to the space station since a Soyuz rocket carrying astronauts failed last month.
The successful liftoff of the Progress cargo craft toward the orbiting outpost was seen as a rehearsal for the next crewed mission on December 3.
That flight will carry Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, and NASA's Anne McClain to the ISS.
Since the retirement of the US space shuttle program in 2011, Russia has the only nation capable of sending people to space.
During the aborted launch on October 11, Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague made an emergency landing and escaped unharmed.
It was the first such incident in the history of post-Soviet space travel.
The Russian cargo ship is scheduled to dock at the space station on Sunday, followed by the Cygnus on Monday, NASA said.
| Buy Advertising | About Us | Editorial & Other Enquiries | Privacy statement |
| The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, is Copyright 1995-2026 Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principles for news reporting and research purposes. |