The Russian cargo ship had trouble launching to the ISS

The Soyuz rocket carrying the Progress 94 took off from the Baikonur spaceport operated by Russia in Kazakhstan at 4:59 p.m. on March 22 (6:59 p.m. Hanoi time). The launch process went smoothly, but Progress 94 encountered problems shortly after separating from the rocket. NASA said that one of the antennas that help the ship automatically pair with the ISS station did not deploy as expected.

“All other systems are operating according to design and the spacecraft will still aim to pair at 9:34 a.m. on March 24 (8:34 p.m. Hanoi time) as planned,” NASA announced on X on March 22. The agency said it is continuing to fix the problem and if the antenna cannot be deployed, astronaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) will control the spacecraft manually through a backup system to dock with the ISS.

Progress 94 is transporting about three tons of food, propellant and other supplies to the crew aboard the ISS. The ship will replace Progress 92, which left the station’s Poisk module on March 16. Progress 94 is expected to dock at the ISS for about 6 months, then carry garbage into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.

The ISS station has two other “disposable” cargo ships, the HTV-X of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Cygnus of the American aerospace company Northrop Grumman. Currently, the only reusable cargo ship is SpaceX’s Dragon.

The ISS was built in space in 1998 and has continuously welcomed rotating crews since November 2000. The station was scheduled to leave orbit at the end of 2030, but a new bill passed this month pushed back the shutdown date to September 30, 2032.

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation wrote in its summary of the bill that the purpose of the extension is to “avoid a gap in capacity and continued human presence in low Earth orbit (LEO), thereby avoiding ceding the lead to China before commercial stations are ready”.