Russia Launches Unmanned Cargo Ship With Supplies to ISS

An unmanned Russian cargo ship launched efficiently Monday with a load of provides for the International Space Station (ISS).

The Progress MS-16 cargo ship blasted off as scheduled at 9:45am native time (9:15am IST) from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan and reached a chosen orbit en path to the station.

It is carrying water, propellant, and different provides and is about to dock on the area outpost Wednesday.

The area outpost is operated by NASA’s Kate Rubins, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi and Russian Space Agency Roscosmos’ Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.

In November final yr, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience by its crew of three Americans and one Japanese astronaut, docked with the ISS 27 hours after launching atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, US. The area station will likely be their house for the subsequent six months. After that, one other set of astronauts on a Crew Dragon capsule will exchange them. That rotation will proceed till Boeing joins the programme with its personal spacecraft late subsequent yr.

The Resilience crew consists of Crew Dragon commander Mike Hopkins and two fellow NASA astronauts: mission pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker. They are joined by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, making his third journey to area after beforehand flying on the US shuttle in 2005 and Soyuz in 2009.

Another US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are aboard the area station from a earlier mission.

“Welcome to the ISS. We can’t wait to have you onboard,” mentioned Kate Rubins, a US astronaut already on the area station.

Before receiving its flight certification from NASA final week, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon had been underneath growth for roughly a decade underneath a public-private NASA programme began in 2011 to revive the company’s human spaceflight functionality.

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