Breaking: Russian Resupply Mission to the Space Station in Trouble

Note: Information about all this is still coming in, so regard anything here as tentative. I’ll add updates to the bottom of this article as I get more reliable news

Last night, at 07:09 UTC (03:09 Eastern U.S. time), a Soyuz 2-1a rocket lifted off from Kazakhstan, carrying an uncrewed Progress capsule loaded with roughly 3 tons of food and supplies for the astronauts on the International Space Station.

After separation from the third stage, however, ground controllers got data showing the telemetry was sporadic and that only two of the five communication antennas had deployed. Not long after that it became clear the capsule was spinning rapidly, tumbling once every three seconds.

The original plan was to put Progress on a quick trajectory to meet ISS after just four orbits (about six hours). That was then delayed, setting up a Thursday rendezvous. With the spacecraft tumbling, this has now been delayed again, this time indefinitely until the problems are fixed.

And there may be a time crunch: Some reports indicate the Progress is in a bad orbit. Instead of a slightly elliptical orbit taking it from 190 to 240 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, the current orbit may be dropping it as low as 124 km, where air is substantially thicker. This puts drag on the vehicle, dropping it lower, where air is thicker, dragging it more … if the capsule is indeed on an orbit with this low a perigee (closest approach to Earth), it may only have a few days before this decay causes it to burn up in the atmosphere.

Again, note that the Progress capsule is uncrewed, so no lives are in immediate danger. The astronauts on ISS have supplies for several months (SpaceX sent up a Dragon capsule with supplies just two weeks ago) and more resupply missions are scheduled (SpaceX has one planned for June 19 and another Progress launch is set for Aug. 6).

This problem comes on only the second flight of the new Soyuz 2-1a, an upgraded version of the standard workhorse Soyuz rocket (the first was in February). It’s too early at the present time to know what went wrong with the flight.

For more information, I suggest keeping an eye on Sen.com, NASA’s space station blog, and the Twitter streams of the ISS and my friend and space expert Jonathan McDowell. 

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