ISS and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

It does seem like the International Space Station is having quite a bad time with re-supply at the moment, three missions have been lost since last October. However things are not really as bad as the title suggests.

Tomorrow morning another re-supply vehicle is scheduled to liftoff from Baikonur, the Russian Progress 60P spacecraft. This is the first flight of the Progress since the previous vehicle 59P was lost after it reached orbit earlier this year. Next month Japan’s HTV spacecraft is also scheduled to launch to the station.

At present the crew has supplies to last them until October without the supplies that both of the flights above launch will be bring with them.

Later this year the Cygnus spacecraft will once again launch to the station, this time using an Atlas 5 vehicle, Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket is scheduled to return to flight next year.

At present we don’t have a timeline for SpaceX to resume flights of there Falcon 9 rocket. Once the details of what happened and what needs to be done to resolve it are available SpaceX will then determine when flights can resume.

So while it has been a bad year for ISS, all that has been lost is replaceable cargo.

We will be publishing an article tomorrow after the launch of the Progress 60P spacecraft.