“We’re now targeting next year for our [first] launch to the space station with those providers”, NASA’s Misty Snopkowski, a launch-site integrator working with SpaceX, told reporters in a March 21 briefing near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The first segment of the station was launched into orbit in 1998, and has since become the largest and most expensive vehicle ever flown in space. This was the second successful flight of that launch system since a failure of one of the rockets in April 2015.
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Progress 61P will be replaced with next Progress MS-02 (63P) which launch is scheduled for today at 16:23 GMT from Baikonur.
This makes inflatable habitats an attractive option for space construction.
Expandable habitats “greatly increase the amount of transport volume” for space missions, Nasa explained.
As such, this two-day rendezvous profile resulted in Progress 63 approaching and conducting an automated docking to the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module at 17:58 UTC (13:58 EDT) on 2 April.
Progress MS-2/63P is then expected to remain docked to the ISS until mid-October, at which point it will undock and perform a destructive reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Progress delivered: Carbon dioxide sensor, vacuum pumps, air fiLTErs, CBO water refinement system, smoke detector and fire extinguisher, CVM onboard computer, sets of tools, PK-4 container (joined ESA and Roscosmos experiment on low temperature gaseous mixtures installed in Columbus European Physiology Module (EPM)), health care equipment and rations provided by NASA for American astronaut and rations provided by Roscosmos.
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The Progress-M series itself underwent upgrades and enhancements in 2008 under the Progress M-01M series of spacecraft.
