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Situation around failed Soyuz MS-14 docking ‘complicated’, says Roscosmos chief

A failure of the equipment installed on the ISS that controls safe converging and locking took place, Dmitry Rogozin added

MOSCOW, August 24. /TASS/. Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin has deemed the situation around the failed launch of the Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) complicated, he wrote on Twitter on Saturday.

"The situation is complicated, but it is under control," he noted, adding that during the docking, "a failure of the equipment installed on the ISS that controls safe converging and locking took place."

The docking of the Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft carrying the Fedor android robot to the International Space Station (ISS) was cancelled on Saturday morning due to potential issues with an amplifier of the Kurs navigation system located on the ISS. The state commission has decided to perform the next attempt to dock Soyuz MS-14 to the ISS on the morning of August 27 after carrying out additional maintenance works.

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. As 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.

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