Next ISS Crew Launch Delayed Due to Soyuz Defect
Russia’s official news agency Itar-Tass is reporting today that the launch of the next International Space Station (ISS) crew will be delayed because of a defective instrument on the crew’s Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft.
The announcement comes just hours after the successful landing of Soyuz TMA-04M with its three-person crew.
Itar-Tass quotes Vladimir Popovkin, director of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, as saying that an otherwise unnamed instrument must be removed from Soyuz TMA-06M, replaced, and tested. That will delay the planned October 15 launch until later in the month — no earlier than October 20, he indicated.
The spacecraft is to take Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Evgeny Tarelkin and NASA astronaut Kevin Ford to the ISS.
User Comments
SpacePolicyOnline.com has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate. We do not post comments that include links to other websites since we have no control over that content nor can we verify the security of such links.