Russian cargo ship bound for the ISS explodes after launch from Kazakhstan

A Russian cargo ship headed for the International Space Station has exploded shortly after launch from Kazakhstan. The unmanned supply ship was carrying rocket fuel, food, water and a new spacesuit and contact was lost six minutes after take-off and two minutes before it was due to arrive in orbit.
This has been reported in news.sky.com dated 2 December 2016.

Russia's Roscosmos space agency has revealed that the incident occurred "about 190km (118 miles) above the rugged, uninhabited, mountainous territory of the Republic of Tyva and most of the fragments were burned in the dense layers of the atmosphere".
The cargo ship had been scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Saturday but, its non arrival "not affect the normal operations of the ISS systems and the subsistence of the station's crew".
Incidentally, this incident is the second failed launch of a Progress cargo ship within two years. In April 2015 a Progress ship disintegrated as it fell to Earth - this failure was blamed on a problem with a Soyuz rocket. As a result of that Russia suspended all space travel for nearly three months and the astronauts in ISS were forced to remain there for an extra month.
Russia sends at least three such supply ships every year to ISS and they plummet back to Earth after delivering the stores and burn up in the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org


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Three new crew members from US, Russia and Japan on their way to the International Space Station

Three new crew members from US, Russia and Japan were on their way to the International Space Station (ISS). One of them is a NASA biologist. They were successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The three are Kate Rubins of NASA, Soyuz Commander Anatoly Ivanishin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. They are traveling in an upgraded Soyuz spacecraft.
This has been reported in thestatesman.com dated 7 July 2016.

The three of them will spend two days along with 34 Earth orbits in the course of testing modified systems before docking to the space station's Rassvet module on Saturday. With their arrival, the station's crew complement will come back to six.
Kate Rubins, Anatoly Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi will join Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams of NASA and Flight Engineers Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos. The plan for the Expedition 48 crew members is to spend four months conducting more than 250 science investigations in fields ranging from biology, Earth science, human research, physical sciences and technology development. Rubins holds a bachelor's degree in molecular biology and is also a doctorate in cancer biology.
Ivanishin and Onishi would remain aboard ISS till late October while Williams, Skripochka and Ovchinin will return to Earth in September.
One of the assignments for Expedition 48 crew members is to receive and install the station's first international docking adapter which will accommodate future arrivals of US commercial crew spacecraft. Among the various experiments are capabilities for sequencing DNA in space, regulating temperatures aboard spacecraft, understanding bone loss and tracking ships around the world and studying how to protect computers from radiation in space and also test out an efficient, three-dimensional solar cell.


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Russia's Moon mission - colony on the Moon by 2030 with 12 cosmonauts

Russia is serious to colonize the Moon. It is building a new spacecraft specifically designed for the moon and plans to send 12 cosmonauts there to establish a colony. It hopes to launch a lunar probe in 2024 to scout out locations and will start building a human colony there in 2030.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 22 June 2016.

Roscosmos has indicated that the human base will be for mining and search and mining for minerals but it could have military applications, as some suggest. In the initial stages, it would be manned by a team of 2 to 4 and that would gradually increase to 10 to 12. The colony would be powered by a sub surface energy station to be located near one of the poles of the Moon and there would be an underground shelter to shield the crew from radiation and any nuclear attacks.
Work has already started on the Luna 25 lander and an Angara A5V heavy lift carrier rocket to dispatch parts to the Moon. The Moon mission would be accomplished by six separate launches of the Angara rocket. Each launch will send one portion of the module to the Moon where these will be assembled on the lines of ISS.
Assembly of the moon base is expected to take more than ten years.
The 'Ryvok' project had been announced in May at the Human Space Exploration international conference in Korolev, near Moscow. The shuttle is expected to be sent on the ISS by Soyuz ships and Angara rockets.


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