Russian Cargo Ship Successfully Docks With Space Station
By STEVE GUTTERMAN
MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian cargo craft successfully docked with the international space station on Thursday, bringing a new spacesuit for the orbital outpost’s two-man Russian-American crew as well as fuel, food, mail, movies – and custom-tailored underwear.
The Progress M-49 craft docked with the station on schedule at 5:54 p.m. (1354 GMT), said Nikolai Kryuchkov, a spokesman at Russian mission control outside Moscow. He said the docking went as planned.
The Progress ship had lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Soyuz-U rocket on Tuesday. It was carrying about 2.5 metric tons (2.76 US tons) of cargo, including water, air and equipment for the station and scientific experiments as well as clothing for the two crewmen and mail from their relatives.
The clothing – including underwear – was sewn to fit Russian Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and American astronaut Mike Fincke, who have been wearing items designed for the men who were originally slated to fly to the station this spring, mission control spokesman Valery Lyndin said.
Padalka and Fincke were substituted for a previously planned crew in February, after clothing fitting the men who remained on Earth had already been delivered, Lyndin said.
Some of the food, too, was sent up to fill menu choices made by Padalka and Fincke, who have been eating items sent to the station before the February crew switch, Lyndin said. The ITAR-Tass news agency said the Progress payload also included stories by Chekhov and Russian films, among them a DVD with a recent serialized version of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot.”
Lyndin said the ship also carried a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit. The U.S. space agency NASA ruled this week that the U.S. spacesuits on the station are unusable and ordered the crew to use Russian gear instead, adding considerable time and distance to a critical spacewalk scheduled for mid-June.
The new spacesuit replaces one that was scrapped because it was old, said Lyndin, adding that there are now five Russian suits at the station.
The mid-June spacewalk involves replacing a power control and circuit breaker box that last month shut down one of the gyroscopes that stabilize the space station and keep it tilted in the right direction. Only two of the four U.S. gyroscopes are working, the bare minimum; the first one shut down two years ago and cannot be replaced until NASA’s shuttles fly again.
Padalka and Fincke spent several days recently trying in vain to get water flowing properly to Padalka’s American spacesuit for cooling. They could not get a spare U.S. spacesuit to work, either, and NASA managers decided to use Russian suits and conduct the spacewalk from the Russian side of the station.
The Russian hatch is more than twice as far from the bad circuit breaker as the U.S. hatch, but the Russian spacesuits are not compatible with communication equipment in the U.S. air lock.
Padalka and Fincke arrived April 21 for a six-month stint at the station, whose assembly has been on hold since the U.S. space shuttle Columbia disaster in February 2003.
—–
On the Net:
More science, space, and technology from RedNova
Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
