The failed launch of a Russian cargo spacecraft on Wednesday is likely to affect further missions to the International Space Station (ISS), Russian experts said.
An unmanned Progress spacecraft, carrying food, water, fuel and experiments to the International Space Station crashed in Siberia minutes after takeoff from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.
The accident will push back planned launches to the ISS, an unnamed space official at Baikonur told the Interfax news agency.
“The launch of a manned Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft scheduled for September 22 will be put off to a later date,” Interfax quoted the expert as saying on Thursday.
The launch of a Glonass navigational satellite planned for Friday has already been cancelled.
The Soyuz-U rocket, which carried the ill-fated Progress M-12M freighter, has the same third stage booster as the Soyuz-FG used for manned flights, the Russian expert explained. It is the third stage that is blamed for Wednesday’s accident. The spacecraft failed to reach orbit because the third stage engines shut off early after developing a malfunction, the Russian space agency Roskosmos said on its website.
Roskosmos said the accident will not disrupt the work of the six-man international crew aboard the ISS as they have sufficient supplies of food, water and oxygen. The space agency also refuted fears voiced by NASA that the planned return to earth of three ISS crew on September 8 may be delayed.
Ecologists fear large-scale environmental damage from the Progress accident as the rocket that crashed on Wednesday carried a ton of highly toxic liquid fuel, Geptil, that can poison soil and underground water for decades. It is not known how much of the fuel was destroyed in a massive explosion that was heard 100 km away from the crash in a remote area of Altai in southern Siberia.
The Progress was the fourth failed space launch in Russia since December last year when a rocket with three Glonass satellites crashed into the Pacific Ocean after launch. The Russian military lost a geodetic satellite in February, and Europe’s biggest satellite for Internet and digital television across Russia was put into the wrong orbit last week.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has ordered an overhaul of quality control procedures during the manufacture of space hardware.
