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Progress 38 docking issues and far, far away flags on your SpacePod for July 6th, 2010

On July 2nd, 2010 an automated docking of the Progress 38 resupply vehicle to the International Space Station failed. The Progress vehicle launched aboard a Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010. About 25 minutes prior to docking problems cropped up. An interference issue between the automated KURS system and the manual TORU system seems to have caused the abort. About an hour after the problems started, Russian managers told the crew to stand down for the day.

At this point International News teams started having a field day with this.

Good thing you guys fired your science reporters. Wouldn’t want you to sound dumb or spread mis-information.

Huh. Well, that’s just wrong. While Progress vehicles have had docking issues with the ISS before, heck even as recent as May of this year, generally they simply switch to the TORU manual docking mechanism and all is fine. But even outside of that, the Progress vehicle has had a serious problem docking before, just not with the ISS.

On June 25th, 1997 while running a TURS system test a Progress vehicle came in too fast and slammed in to the MIR space station. Not only did this vehicle not dock but it damaged the space station causing emergency decompression and throwing MIR in to an uncontrolled spin.

So yeah, they have had issues docking the Progress vehicle before.

Of course in this case, there was no collision and everyone was safe the entire time. The Progress vehicle noted the issue and went in to safe mode flying past the ISS at a very safe distance of 3 kilometers or about 1.8 miles. On Saturday some course correction changes were uploaded to the progress vehicle. Then on Sunday, July 4th at 16:17 UTC the Progress vehicle safely docked with the International Space Station.

Progress 38 is carrying 2.6 tonnes of fuel, food, water and supplies for the six Expedition 24 crew members aboard Station. A few minutes of scary followed by engineering pulling out the awesome to get the craft docked safely with ISS. That’s how space goes!

Before we go, it is kinda cool to think that this last 4th of July, the American flag furthest from its home country of the US wasn’t on foreign soil, it wasn’t on the ISS and it wasn’t even on the Moon! The furthest American flag out there is about 17 Billion Kilometers or about 10.5 billion miles traveling aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft! The next furthest flag out there is aboard Voyager 2 which is just under 14 billion kilometers or 8.5 billion miles. How far away is that? Well, so far that each craft is leaving our home solar system. How’s that for awesome?