Various: The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), Europe's new orbital cargo ship, launched from French Guiana on a mission to resupply the space station two days ago reports the BBC.

The 20-tonne unmanned freighter, the biggest and most complex spacecraft Europe has built, left the Kourou spaceport at 0403 GMT, riding atop an Ariane V rocket. Only one glitch arose out of the flight, with one of the four engines malfunctioning says the Washington Post.

The ATV will still be able to dock with the international space station next month after the space shuttle has successfully delivered a Japanese laboratory to the station. Endeavour launched early this morning on a 16-day flight.

In just 2 1/2 years, the US will no longer have any spacecraft of its own capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to the station, in which roughly $100 billion is being invested. The three space shuttles will be retired by then, because of their high cost and questionable safety, and NASA will have nothing ready to replace them until 2015 at the earliest. The ATV is seen by NASA as a new option to reduce NASA's dependancy on Russian spacecraft to service the station says Marc Kaufman in the Washington Post.

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