MOSCOW- Russian supply ship Progress M-61 was blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan's steppes to the international Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, the Mission Control outside Moscow said.

The Soyuz-2 carrier rocket with the supply ship was launched at 21:33 Moscow time (1733 GMT). The spaceship reached the orbit nine minutes later. It will deliver to the ISS 2,500 kg of cargoes, including water, fuel and computers for the space station's Russian segment, as well as parcels from families of the spacemen.

The spaceship will dock with the ISS on August 5.

A poster with the portrait of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian space exploration pioneer, is on the cone of the carrier rocket Soyuz-2. It is dedicated to the 150th jubilee of the scientist that will be marked in September.

The ISS will receive six computers to substitute those that went out of repair in the middle of June.

The computers, which were responsible for the ISS' orientation, were knocked out by strong electromagnetic field impacts after the crew of the U.S. shuttle Atlantis deployed new solar panels on the space station's exterior.

Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov abolished the malfunction and reported the faults in all ISS systems, but the "revived "computers are still posing problems.

Another Russian supply ship Progress M-59 packed full with waste from the ISS was dumped in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday.

Two supply ships are attached to the ISS at present. In December last year, Russian Mission Control embarked on the practice of not dumping Progress ships before arrival of replacement cargo spacecraft, as it was done earlier, but to fully use their oxygen supply and to load them with the space station's waste to a maximum.

Apart from oxygen, specialists seek to make maxim use of the remaining fuel at the supply ships, leaving in them only a minimum necessary for their deorbiting.