An unmanned Russian Progress cargo ship successfully launched to deliver supplies to the worldwide Space Station (ISS).
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The ISS currently is manned by Russians Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko and American Scott Kelly.
The Cygnus – at no fault for the failure – was carrying 2,215 kilograms (4,883 lb) of cargo, which included 727 kilograms (1600 lb) of scientific equipment and 748 kilograms (1650 lb) of food and supplies for the crew.
The previous Progress launch in April ended in failure, and on Sunday a USA supply mission failed too when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket broke apart shortly after liftoff.
The SpaceX rocket was riding to the rescue of a space station crew that had already had to forgo the replenishment of supplies that were aboard a Russian cargo capsule launched in April.
Typically, the ISS is stocked with six months of supplies, but at a recent press conference, NASA Space Station Program Office Manager Mike Suffredini said, “Today, we’re at, give or take, about four months”. It also carried a docking adapter which was to allow people to arrive aboard America’s first crewed spacecraft since the space shuttle.
The Soyuz carrier rocket launched Progress into blue skies at 10:55 a.m. local time in Baikonur (12:55 a.m. EDT) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. And it appeared to go off without a hitch as the booster arced away to the east directly into the plane of the space station’s orbit.
Russian flight controllers and engineers were initially confused as to what had gone wrong, but the problem was later blamed on the rocket that the spacecraft had been attached to.
Resupply missions to the worldwide Space Station (ISS) rarely fail – let alone twice in row, like the last two did.
The station crew flying 250 miles up was asleep when the launch occurred. The spacecraft burned in the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean after its improper separation from the Soyuz carrier rocket which was caused by fuel leaks, as stated by Russia’s space agency Roscosmos.
Play video “SpaceX Launch Failure”. Mostly, they conduct experiments.
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The failures cast a shadow over the still emerging space transport industry, but experts said they had not exposed any fundamental flaws. A Japanese mission is aslo set to fly in August, and a private launch from the American firm Orbital is scheduled for sometime late in the year.
