Russia’s Progress M-12M launches toward ISS – fails to achieve orbit
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/08/russias-progress-m-12m-fails-to-achieve-orbit/The Russian Progress M-12M spacecraft, also known by its US designation of 44P, blasted off toward the International Space Station (ISS) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today (Wednesday 24th August) at around 1:00 PM GMT, which was 7:00 PM Baikonur time. Unfortunately for the ISS, around 325 seconds into the flight, the third stage of the Russian Soyuz-U rocket prematurely shut down, leaving Progress M-12M stranded on a sub-orbital trajectory.
For the first time since 15 October 2002, the Russian Soyuz-U, one of the three most-reliable launch vehicles currently in operation failed to successfully launch its payload. This launch was also the first-ever launch failure with a Progress spacecraft since they began resupplying space stations in 1978. With the recent retirement of the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station is largely dependent upon the Soyuz-U for cargo resupply and exclusively depends upon the Soyuz-FG for crew.
This failure will ground the Soyuz launch vehicle and will delay the next planned crew launch.Gee, that "Era of the Soyuz" and reliability the Russians were gloating about last month didn't work out too well did it?
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/21/dasvidaniya-as-shuttle-era-ends-soyuz-era-begins-russia-says/Diss Vidaniya: Shuttle Ends 50 Years of U.S. Space Flight as Russia Trumpets 'Era of Soyuz'
"From today, the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight, the era of reliability," the Russian space agency Roskosmos said.
Progress M-12M – carrying three tons of supplies including food, fuel, and other miscellaneous items – was the first spacecraft to launch to the ISS in the post-Shuttle era, an era where regular ISS resupply flights will be extremely important to the continued operation of the station. Needless to say, the launch failure sets the post-Shuttle ISS resupply plan off to a bad start. The failure could not have come at a worse time for the ISS, with the Space Shuttle recently retired, commercial resupply flights not yet online, and a potential delay of the HTV-3 and ATV-3 missions into mid-2012.
The ISS now has ample room to accommodate supplies, due to the addition of the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM), now stocked full of supplies from the recent STS-135 mission, which delivered one year’s worth of supplies to the ISS, which sources say is only sufficient to sustain the station crew when supplemented with scheduled Progress deliveries.
The loss of this Progress will especially be felt by the ISS because it was scheduled to perform three reboosts of the station's orbit in the coming weeks, which now will have to be performed with assets already at the station, namely the engines onboard the Service Module (which are rarely used because of their limited service life, i.e. can be used only a certain number of times). Also, per ISS policy, if the Soyuz rocket is still grounded 40 days from now, half of the ISS crew would be required due to mission rules to return to Earth. This is unlikely to happen because those three are already scheduled to return home on 8 September (because the on-orbit life of their Soyuz spacecraft will expire), but their replacements will be delayed due to the failure investigation (they were scheduled to launch on 22 September). The next scheduled Progress resupply launch is on 28 October.
This was the third consecutive orbit launch attempt which failed.
I said in
the thread about the two consecutive failures that this is practically unheard of in the modern era, well three consecutive failures hasn't happened since the end of 1965 and beginning of 1966. A Russian Kosmos rocket failed to launch an ELINT satellite on 28 December 1965, followed by the failure of an American Thor rocket with a military weather satellite on 6 January 1966 from Vandenberg AFB, California. Then the next day, a Russian Vostok rocket failed to launch a photo reconnaissance satellite.
This failure places added pressure upon SpaceX and their scheduled launch on 30 November of the Dragon spacecraft to the ISS as a demonstration for their COTS resupply contract. The failure means that this launch will be docking at the ISS and will be carrying supplies.
More updates and a detailed ISS Status Update as I get the information...
