Russia's Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft blasted off on a mission to rescue two cosmonauts and a Nasa astronaut stranded at the International Space Station after a leak in the cooling system of their capsule.
The unmanned craft lifted off from Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan and had been placed in orbit, Russian news agency Tass reported.
The Soyuz capsule was expected to dock with the ISS early on Sunday.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and US astronaut Francisco Rubio were left stranded in space after the cooling system of their Soyuz MS-22 capsule started leaking two months ago.
They had been due to end their mission in March.
The leak in December was reportedly caused by a tiny micrometeorite space rock that punctured an external radiator.
A similar impact is believed to have caused a leak on the cooling system of the Progress MS-21 cargo ship earlier this month.
The damaged Soyuz will return to Earth with no one aboard by the end of March, so engineers can examine it.
The three men launched in this Soyuz in September on what should have been a six-month mission.
They will now stay in space for a full year until a new capsule is ready for their crew replacements in September.
Tass said 430kg of cargo was sent aboard the replacement craft, including medical equipment, scientific instruments, water, food and cleaning supplies — three times the amount normally dispatched for such missions, according to a Russian space official.
The damaged supply ship was filled with rubbish and cut loose at the weekend, burning up in the atmosphere.
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