MOSCOW, November 16. /TASS/. Director General of Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin has thanked all those behind the successful launch of a Soyuz-FG carrier rocket on Friday.
"The state commission held a meeting after the launch of the cargo spaceship from the Baikonur space center. Dmitry Rogozin thanked operational crews for the successful launch," Roscosmos said on its Twitter account.
The Soyuz-FG carrier rocket with the Progress MS-10 cargo spaceship blasted off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan at 21:14 Moscow time on Friday. The Progress is to dock to the Zvezda service module of the International Space Station (ISS) at 22:29 Moscow time on November 18. The spaceship will deliver about 2.5 tonnes of cargoes, including fuels, water and pressurized gases, to the ISS.
The Progress spacecraft was originally scheduled to be launched to the ISS on October 30 but the launch was rescheduled for November 16 following the abortive launch of October 11.
Soyuz-FG carrier rocket with a manned Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft blasted off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station (ISS) on October 11. On board the spacecraft were Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin (the commander of the Soyuz MS-10) and NASA astronaut Nick Hague.
Following a smooth liftoff, the Soyuz’s booster malfunctioned between the first and second stages of separating, whereupon the crew was forced to abort the flight and switch to ballistic descent. The manned Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft ended up landing safely in the Kazakh steppe. The crew was not hurt. This was the first emergency situation with the launch of a manned spacecraft over the past 35 years.
The incident-probing commission announced on November 1 that the emergency situation occurred after "a nozzle cover on the oxidizer tank failed to open due to the deformation of the separation contact sensor."
The sensor was damaged during the assembly of the rocket’s first stage at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.