An unmanned space craft loaded with more than 2-1/2 tons of food and supplies for the International Space Station was destroyed about six minutes after liftoff, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Twitter.

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying the Progress capsule blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as planned at 9:51 a.m. EST (3.51 in Malta), a NASA TV broadcast showed.

But 382 seconds later ground control teams lost radio contact with the rocket, Roscosmos said on its website.

"Loss of Progress occurred at an altitude of about 190 km (118 miles)," Roscosmos said.

The six-member crew aboard the station is not in any danger and has enough supplies for several months, NASA said.

Today's launch was the fourth failed cargo run to the station in the past two years, including one previous Progress failure.

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