The Progress M-06M (38P) cargo carrier launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday at 10:35 a.m. CDT.
Credit: Roscosmos TV
Scheduled to dock with the International Space Station at 11:58 a.m. Friday, the unmanned Progress is loaded with 1,918 pounds of propellant, 110 pounds of oxygen and air, 220 pounds of water and 2,667 pounds of equipment, spare parts and experiment hardware.
The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth.
The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical. But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo module.
On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the third is called the orbital module.