Watch Russia launch a fresh cargo ship to the International Space Station today
A new Russian cargo ship will blast off today (Feb. 14) with tons of supplies and equipment for the Expedition 66 crew of the International Space Station. Here’s how you can watch it live.
A Soyuz rocket from the Russian space agency Roscosmos is scheduled to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:25 p.m. EST Monday (0425 GMT or 9:25 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Feb. 15). Coverage will start running at 11 a.m. EST (0400 GMT) on NASA Television, the NASA app, NASA social media and here at Space.com.
The ship will take a relatively slow three-day journey to the International Space Station before docking on Thursday (Feb. 17), which will also be carried live. NASA TV’s live coverage of the cargo ship’s arrival should begin at 1:30 a.m. EST (0630 GMT) and the Progress should link up with the Russian Poisk docking compartment at 2:06 a.m. EST (0806 GMT).
Related: How Russia’s Progress spaceships work (infographic)
NASA stated that the spacecraft will carry three tons of food, fuel and supplies to the International Space Station and that the departure date for Progress 80, as the spacecraft is called, will be determined by Roscosmos at a later date.
Roscosmos announced days ago it plans to shorten Progress deliveries to a single-orbit, two-hour journey to the orbiting lab. Should early testing go to plan, implementation is expected in 2023.
Starting in 2018, many Progress launches were able to get to the station in just two orbits or three hours. But the timing of the launches and space station arrivals is subject to many factors, such as the activities of other spacecraft docked to the space station.
Progress is the main spacecraft by which Russia delivers supplies to its crews on the International Space Station, following the work of previous Progress variants that supplied earlier stations such as Salyut 6 and Mir. Progress was first developed in the 1970s under the now-defunct Soviet Union.
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