SUBMITTED BY ARTHUR N1ORC - AMSAT A/C 31468
Progress to Launch to Space Station
05.08.07
A new Progress freighter is scheduled to launch to the International
Space Station at 11:25 p.m. EDT Friday, May 11, with more than 2.5 tons
of fuel, air, water and other supplies and equipment aboard.
The station's 25th Progress unpiloted cargo carrier will bring to the
orbiting laboratory more than 1,050 pounds of propellant, almost 100
pounds of air, more than 925 pounds of water and 3,042 pounds of dry
cargo – a total of 5,125 pounds.
Progress cargo spacecraftP25 will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan. It is scheduled to dock with the station Tuesday, May 15, at
about 1:10 a.m.
The spacecraft will use the automated Kurs system to dock at the aft
port of the Zvezda Service Module. Expedition 15 Commander Fyodor
Yurchikhin will be at the manual Toru docking system controls, should
his intervention become necessary.
Expedition 15 crew members, Yurchikhin and flight engineers Sunita
Williams and Oleg Kotov, will continue to use oxygen from the Progress
24 at the Pirs Docking Compartment. It is scheduled to remain there
until mid-August.
Once its cargo is unloaded, P25 will be filled with trash and station
discards. It is scheduled to be undocked, deorbited and incinerated on
re-entry on July 20.
The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the
Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a
lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth. The aft module,
the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical.
But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and
the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo
module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on
launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the
third is called the orbital module.
