On Sunday, Russia launched a Soyuz rocket from a repaired launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, restoring for the first time the ability to send missions to the International Space Station after the facility was damaged last year, Reuters reports.
At 12:00 GMT, a Soyuz-2.1a rocket carrying the Progress MS-33 cargo ship took off and was placed in orbit, announced the Russian space agency. The ship is expected to dock with the International Space Station on March 24.
The launch pad had been taken out of operation after it was severely damaged in November, when a Soyuz MS-28 ship with two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut on board took off from the same platform.
No one was injured, and the crew safely reached the space station, but the incident left Russia for months without the only means of sending crews or cargo to the ISS from that ramp.
Although Russia has other cosmodromes on its own territory, and Baikonur has several launch platforms, the damaged ramp was the only one capable of launching the Soyuz rockets carrying crew capsules and Progress cargo ships to the International Space Station.
Video, HERE