KOROLEV /Moscow Region/, August 24. /TASS/. The Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft with the android robot Fedor aboard, has not docked with the International Space Station yet. The docking was scheduled for 8:30 Moscow time, according to the broadcast on the website of Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos.

The ship was already at a distance of 96 meters from the ISS, when it began to move away from it. Now the distance to the ISS is about 280 meters, a TASS correspondent reported from the Mission Control Center.

The Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket blasted off from the Gagarin Start launch pad of the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan at 06:38 Moscow time on Thursday, delivering the Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft with the android robot Fedor into the near-Earth orbit. The spacecraft with the robot on its board was set to dock with the International Space Station at 08:31 Moscow time on August 24 after a two-day flight.

From 2002, Russia used Soyuz-FG carrier rockets to deliver international crews to the orbital outpost. From 2020, Russia is set to switch to Soyuz-2.1a rockets, which previously delivered only freight spaceships and satellites into orbit. The launch on August 22 is a test blastoff before a manned mission to the International Space Station.

The robot Fedor (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research or FEDOR) has been developed by Android Technology Company and the Advanced Research Fund on a technical assignment from Russia’s Emergencies Ministry.

The android robot has received its own name of Skybot F-850 where the letter F stands for its affiliation with the Fedor family of robots.

As Roscosmos Chief Rogozin said, the Skybot F-850’s basic goals include transmitting telemetry data, determining parameters related to the flight safety, including overloads, and carrying out experiments to test the robot’s operations useful on the external side of the space station.

The robot will stay about 17 days in orbit. In general, the robot Fedor will act as an artificial cosmonaut, the Roscosmos chief said.