MOSCOW, August 23. /TASS/. A Russian Soyuz-2.1a rocket carrying the Progress MS-24 cargo spaceship will blast off from the Baikonur spaceport on Wednesday.
According to the Roscosmos State Space Corporation, the launch is scheduled for 4:08 a.m. Moscow time (1:08 a.m. GMT). In about nine minutes, the spaceship will be delivered into orbit. It is expected to dock with the Zvezda module of the International Space Station (ISS) at 6:50 a.m. Moscow time (3:50 a.m. GMT) on Friday.
This will be the third Progress MS launch this year and the sixth one from the Baikonur spaceport. The rocket is decorated with images dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the Russian city of Yekaterinburg and the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Utkin, a designer of intercontinental ballistic missiles and spacecraft.
Progress MS-24 is expected to deliver about 2.5 metric tons of cargo to the ISS, including 500 kilograms of fuel, 420 liters of drinking water, 40 kilograms of compressed nitrogen, as well as 1,535 kilograms of resource equipment and tools, experiment setups, medical monitoring kits, sanitation supplies and clothing.
Officials at the Research Institute of Food and Concentrate Industry and Special Food Technology told TASS earlier that the cargo spaceship would also bring food for Russian cosmonauts to the space outpost.
The Russian crew’s psychological support service, in turn, told TASS, that a figurine of the E.T. alien from Steven Spielberg's movie would be delivered to the ISS upon Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev’s request.