BAIKONUR /Kazakhstan/, March 22. /TASS/. The rapprochement of the Soyuz MS-25 crewed spacecraft and the International Space Station (ISS) will take about 50 hours, and not three and a half, as it was planned in case of the vehicle's launch on Thursday, Roscosmos has told the media.
"The spacecraft with a crew consisting of Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, spaceflight participant from the Belarus Marina Vasilevskaya and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson will reach the ISS in two days. The docking of the crewed spacecraft is due on March 25 at 6:10 p.m. Moscow time (3:10 p.m. GMT)," Roscosmos said.
Earlier, Russia’s historian of cosmonautics Alexander Zheleznyakov mentioned such a possibility to TASS. He explained that specific ballistic conditions were needed for the super-fast rendezvous. In case of the launch on a reserve day they may not exist.
On Thursday, the launch of the Soyuz-2.1a vehicle, which was to put into orbit the Soyuz MS-25 manned spacecraft with the crew of the 21st expedition to the ISS, was automatically aborted at the Baikonur space site seconds before lift-off. According to Roscosmos CEO Yuri Borisov, the cancelation was caused by a slump in the current of a chemical power source. The crew was not affected. Borisov added that the launch had been rescheduled for 3:36 p.m. Moscow time (12:36 p.m. GMT) on Saturday, March 23.
In the history of Russian cosmonautics, there have been no earlier cancelations of crewed launches when the crew were already in the seats. In the Soviet Union, this happened once in 1969, when the launch of the Soyuz-4 spacecraft with cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov on board was canceled.