Russian supply ship launched to International Space Station

While this is only the third failure for a Progress mission, the Parabolic Arc noted Russian launch vehicles – including Proton, Soyuz, Rockot, and Zenit – have experienced 13 failures since 2009.

Launch of a Japanese cargo ship is scheduled for December 9. NASA refers to this as Progress 65.

In October 2014 a rocket launched by Orbital Sciences Corp. exploded shortly after launch at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Delmarva Peninsula. The state organization has begun an investigation into what went wrong, with initial suggestions from NASA including the possibility that the third stage shut down earlier than intended.

The first two rocket stages appeared to have functioned nominally. NASA has also clarified that the supplies on the ISS are comfortable. “Consumables aboard the station are at good levels”, NASA spokesman Dan Huot, of the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, told Space.com via email.

The unmanned vehicle contained 2.6 tons of food along with fuel and supplies for the astronauts aboard the ISS.

The space vessel seemingly won’t arrive at the International Space Station, the Russian TASS agency reports referring to its sources.

Roscomos later confirmed the loss of the Progress MS-04 about 118 miles above Tuva, a “rugged uninhabited mountainous territory”, the agency wrote in a release. Russian Federation is phasing it out and the newer Soyuz-2 is meant to replace it for these missions.

Progress is one of four uncrewed resupply vessels that now fly missions to the ISS; the others are Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) and the Dragon and Cygnus spacecraft, which are built by the American aerospace companies SpaceX and Orbital ATK, respectively.

This crash represents the third to Roscosmos in the last few years. “Routine control systems failed to register the spacecraft in the designated orbit”, noted Roscosmos in a statement.

Anatoly Zak, editor of RussianSpaceWeb.com, tweeted that residents of the Tuva Region reported an explosion and shaking at the time of the anomaly.

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, launched a new cargo ship to the International Space Station today (Dec. 1), but the fate of the robotic supply ship is unclear after issues cropped up during its trip into space.