[Omah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14653371

An unmanned freighter launched to the International Space Station (ISS) has been lost.

The Russian space agency has confirmed the Progress M-12M cargo ship was not placed in the correct orbit by its rocket and fell back to Earth.

The vessel was carrying some three tonnes of supplies for the ISS crew.

With the retirement of the US space shuttle, there is now a critical reliance on the robotic freighters to keep the station supplied.

Progress is one of five current and future unmanned vessels tasked with the role.

This mission, the 44th such cargo delivery flight to the space station, lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 13:00 GMT (17:00 Moscow time).

It appears the Soyuz rocket's third and final propulsion stage system shut down early. As a result, the Russian federal space agency (Roskosmos) said, the Progress vessel "was not placed in the correct orbit".

The failure occurred some 325 seconds into the flight.

RIA Novosti said the freighter could have come down in Russia's Altai region on the border with Mongolia and China. The news agency quoted a local official in the Gorni Altai region as saying a distant blast had been heard and that emergency services had been despatched to investigate.

This is the second Russian rocket failure in a week. On 18 August, a Proton vehicle put a telecommunications satellite in the wrong orbit.

In December, another Proton failure resulted in top Russian space agency officials losing their jobs.

Progress uses a Soyuz-U rocket to get into orbit. The systems used to launch the manned Soyuz capsule are very similar, and the ISS partners will want to be sure there were no issues in Wednesday's failure that might compromise the next crew launch due next month.

I'll bet the crew want to be sure, too .....