As a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship closed in on the International Space Station early Wednesday, a Russian Soyuz-U rocket making the venerable booster’s final flight successfully lifted a Progress supply ship into orbit, three months after an upper stage failure destroyed another station-bound freighter. Mounted atop a snow-covered launch pad — the same pad used by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin at the dawn of the Space Age — the Soyuz-U rocket carrying the Progress MS-05/66P cargo ship thundered to life at 12:58 a.m. EST and climbed away from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.