The Russian army has successfully launched a military satellite into space by a Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket and put it into a designated orbit

The Russian army has successfully launched a military satellite into space by a Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket and put it into a designated orbit, Russia's Aerospace Defense Forces said.

"A medium-class Soyuz-2.1a rocket with a military satellite lifted off from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia," Colonel Dmitry Zenin, a spokesman for Russia's Aerospace Defense Forces, said on Friday.

Zenin added that the rocket had been launched at 18:24 Moscow time (1524 GMT) on Friday from Plesetsk under the command of Lieutenant General Alexander Golovko, the commander of Russia's Aerospace Defense Forces.

“The spacecraft has been put into the designated orbit. The satellite separated in a routine mode," he noted.

It was the first Soyuz-2.1a launch after the failure of such carrier rocket with a Progress M-27M cargo spaceship in April.

The Progress M-27M cargo spacecraft was launched on April 28 by a Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur space center and was scheduled to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) six hours after the blast-off.

However, the spacecraft failed to reach the ISS as it went into an uncontrolled spin in space and finally kept dropping in orbit, which resulted in its re-entry into the atmosphere and burn-up over the middle of the Pacific Ocean on May 8.