Thursday, December 1, 2016

Russian Progress spacecraft lost after 3rd stage anomaly

A Progress vehicle on a Soyuz-U rocket launched today to go and dock with the Space Station on Dec. 3rd with supplies and food for the astronauts and stay docked for several months. However, due to an error that occurred during the burn of the vehicle's third stage that caused the Progress spacecraft to reenter back into the Earth's atmosphere in a remote and unpopulated area in the mountains in Southern Siberia. The Soyuz-U rocket launched with Progress MS-04 spacecraft at 9:51am EDT from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. All the events of the launch were going nominally and once the Spacecraft was in Space there was confusion whether the solar arrays and the navigation antennae have deployed or not. The supplies on Progress weren't too important and the crew members on the ISS will be okay without it. European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet tweeted, "Spaceflight is hard, sorry to hear the news @roscosmos. We are fine up here and will function fine until the next supply spacecraft arrives".   

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