The intention was to give the US a crew-carrier and rocket technology that could go beyond low-Earth orbit to more distant targets, back to the Moon and further.
On August 24, a Progress M-12M space freighter carrying food and other items to the space station broke up over southern Siberia after failing to separate from its Soyuz-U carrier rocket, RIA Novosti reported.
As a matter of fact, they already launched that aircraft carrier we bought them, along with a Tiangong-1 rocket that lifted the first module of a planned Chinese space station to orbit from a launch site in the Jiuquan, Gansu province.