The U.S. Discovery space shuttle successfully...

Shuttle Discovery blasted off on schedule at 6:21 a.m. local time (14:21 GMT) on Monday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on one of NASA"s final stockpiling missions to the ISS.

This mission is noted the number of female astronauts on board the ISS at one time - four. Earlier the Russian spacecraft Soyuz TMA-18 carried American astronaut Tracy Caldwell-Dyson among the Russian cosmonauts to the ISS. Three other women, Stefanie Wilson, Dorothy Metcalf-Linderburger and Naoko Yamazaki are to join her in orbit.

This is Discovery"s 33rd mission to the ISS, and the 131st mission of the Space Shuttle program. The mission will last 13 days and astronauts will perform three space walks, each of which is planned to last around six and a half hours. The astronauts will replace a liquid ammonia tank and a gyroscope that has malfunctioned during the planned space walks on the fifth, seventh and ninth day of the mission.

MOSCOW, April 7 (RIA Novosti)