MOSCOW, October 12. /TASS/. The crew of the International Space Station is supplied with all necessary items for a long period and nothing critical will happen to cosmonauts, if the launch of a Progress MS-07 cargo spacecraft is rescheduled from October 14, a source in the space industry told TASS on Thursday.
"The automatics of the carrier rocket [the Soyuz-2.1a] have cancelled the launch and specialists are looking into the causes. But there is a certain program. If the Progress does not blast off now, then the next attempt will be made. If the next launch is also rescheduled, this is absolutely normal and there is nothing critical in that," the source said.
"This program stipulates a cycle [of launch postponements] for a long period. But there is nothing critical for the existence of the expedition in orbit. The food and water supplies will suffice them," he said.
Carrier rocket launch rescheduled
Currently, Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Sergei Ryazanski, NASA astronauts Randolph Bresnik, Mark Vande Hei and Joseph Acaba, and also ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli are working aboard the International Space Station.
As Russia’s Flight Control Center reported, the launch of the resupply ship cancelled on Thursday is rescheduled for October 14 at 11:46 Moscow time. A decision on the scheme of its flight (a two-day, a six-hour or a three-hour option) will be made by the government commission separately.
The Progress MS-07 cargo spacecraft was expected to blast off on Thursday to perform its flight to the International Space Station under a three-hour scheme (two revolutions around the Earth) for the first time.
As of today, the quickest practiced scheme of the flight to the orbital station by Progress and Soyuz spacecraft is a six-hour scheme (four revolutions around the Earth). The four-rotation scheme was used for the first time by a Progress M-16M spacecraft, which blasted off in August 2012.