"The transport ship, launched Monday to the ISS, docked with the station successfully Thursday," a spokesman said.
Astronauts currently working on the International Space Station will have their six-month mission extended by another month to avoid early spring flooding on the Kazakh steppe, where they are due to land, a Russian space official said last Wednesday.
According to a revised schedule, U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin of the Expedition 14 crew, who began working on the world's sole orbital station September 20, will return to Earth in April instead of March.
They will be joined by the fifth space tourist on their return trip, Hungarian-born American software billionaire Charles Simonyi, who is expected to arrive at the ISS with the 15th crew.
The flooding makes it "extremely hard to find a dry place for a capsule with astronauts to land on, and landing on a flooded steppe may be quite dangerous," he said.
European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter of Germany, who has been on board the station since July, will work as part of the Expedition 14 crew until December, and will then hand off to astronaut Sunita Williams.
