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Russian Cargo Ship Docks At ISS On Second Try

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-free-after-thirty-minutes dept.

FleaPlus writes "Following up on a story from a few days ago about an unmanned Russian cargo ship's initial aborted attempt at docking with the International Space Station, Space.com reports that the vehicle made a second pass on July 4, which succeeded. Russian engineers believe the initial abort was triggered when the (normally reliable) Progress spacecraft detected interference between a remote control system on the ISS and Progress's camera. It successfully docked on the second try by using the autonomous system instead."

3 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Seems a little funny... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you read the first article you'd know that they tried the automated system the first time but it couldn't hold a targeting lock on the ISS and they decided to abort the attempt.

    READING: It Teaches you Stuff!

  2. Idiotic media coverage of a non-event by damburger · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Progress, like any spacecraft, is a complex system. Things won't always go to plan - that said it has, like a lot of the old Russian hardware, a decent track record. This isn't the first time one has gone a but funky, but it is very far from the first time one has been sent up to a space station.

    These things have been supplying stations in LEO since 1978, but to hear the media tell it this is a flaky, experimental piece of equipment just waiting to go wrong, and the failure of just a single docking attempt might put the whole ISS program in danger.

    --
    If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
  3. Re:Humans in the loop by selven · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Explain to me why we need people in space again.

    Because there are 6.7 billion people on a planet which can only sustain 4-5 billion, and we need to be practicing now if we want to be prepared for when we have to expand to new real estate.