Cargo Ship Fails To Seal Tightly With Station

ANN REALTIME UPDATE 10.26.06 2030 EDT: All is well following some tense moments onboard the International Space Station Thursday... after a Progress cargo module had some problems securely attaching to the station.

Scientists traced the problem to a faulty antenna that failed to retract for docking with the station, potentially interfering with final latching. Russian flight controllers worked on the problem for about three hours... before they determined the antenna was not a problem, and gave the crew the all-clear for final docking.

Due to the long day, the three-man crew onboard the ISS will wait until Friday before they unload the supplies, equipment, propellant and oxygen carried onboard the Progress module.

Hey... better late than never.

Original Report

ANN REALTIME REPORTING 10.26.06 1340 EDT: A new Progress docked to the International Space Station at 10:29 am EDT Thursday with almost 2.5 tons of fuel, oxygen, other supplies and equipment aboard... but there may be some problems with getting its cargo onboard the station.

"The ship did not succeed in latching on tightly to the station," Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin told The Associated Press. "There is no danger to the crew."

CNN reports a faulty antenna apparently failed to hook up fully to the station after what appeared to have been an uneventful automated docking.

"The problem was linked to Progress' navigation antenna, which failed to fold and prevented the ship and the station from being fully linked," Lyndin said. "The unpleasant thing for the crew is they can't immediately get to the supplies."

Russian Space Agency spokesman Igor Panarin states the station's crew -- Expedition 14 crew members Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria, flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin, and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter -- has enough supplies for a safe stay in orbit, even if the problem could not be fixed quickly.

NASA reports the station's 23rd Progress unpiloted cargo carrier carries more than 1,900 pounds of propellant, about 110 pounds of oxygen, and 2,784 pounds of dry cargo. P23 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Monday at 9:41 am EDT. It reached the station after a flight of just over three days.

P23's sister cargo carrier and a predecessor at the station, ISS Progress 22, remains at the Pirs docking compartment. It is scheduled to be undocked after it is emptied and subsequently filled with station discards. It will be deorbited with its load of trash and burn in the Earth's atmosphere on re-entry.

The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crewmembers to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth. The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical.

But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the third is called the orbital module. 

FMI: www.nasa.gov