Out-of-control space ship ‘tumbling’ back to earth

Russia’s Progress M-27M cargo ship blasts off from the launch pad at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday. Russian officials have admitted that the unmanned Progress spacecraft carrying supplies to the International Space Station had suffered a glitch.

DPA/AFPMoscowAn unmanned Russian spaceship with supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) is out of control and slowly tumbling back towards Earth, Russian news reports said yesterday.“The situation is hopeless. There is no way to bring the vessel back into orbit,” an unnamed source in Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said, the state-run Tass news agency reported.Earlier, engineers at ground control in Korolyov outside Moscow vowed that they won’t give up attempts to gain control of the orbiting Progress spacecraft.Experts said that the Russian-built cargo vessel will be destroyed when it enters Earth’s atmosphere.“It’ll now slowly fall & burn up,” Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who served as the ISS’s commander in 2013, wrote on Twitter.The Progress blasted off from the Russian Baikonur launch facility on Tuesday and was supposed to dock with the ISS the same day.But it flew too high and ended up in a wrong orbit after a rocket failure, while its unmanoeuverability was blamed on a glitch with its antennas.There are currently six astronauts on the space station, which is operated jointly by Russia, the US, Europe, Japan and Canada.Roscosmos has said that the station’s supplies last until September.However, Russian experts warned that the Soyuz rocket that carried Progress to space was the same that is used for manned flights to the ISS.A mission planned for May 26 to bring three astronauts to the station might be delayed, Tass reported, quoting a source at the Baikonur cosmodrome. A spokesman for the Russian space agency, Mikhail Fadeyev, declined immediate comment.The loss of the Progress supply ship would be the latest embarrassment for Russia’s space programme that has been recently hit by a series of mishaps.The controllers had on Tuesday opted to change the flight plan and extend the vessel’s journey to two days instead of six hours in a bid to fix the glitch.The Russian space programme is renowned for having sent the first man into space in 1961 and launching the first sputnik satellite four years earlier, and remains a major source of national pride.But more recently it has endured a series of setbacks, notably losing expensive satellites and a similar Progress supply ship in 2011.Shortly after launch, the vessel crashed into Siberia, marking one of Russia’s biggest space setbacks. Deputy prime minister in charge of the aerospace industry, Dmitry Rogozin, who is currently in China, said he was in constant touch with the space agency.“We’re all worrying about our cargo spacecraft,” he said on Twitter.Nasa said none of the equipment on board was critical for the US section of the ISS, and that the astronauts have plenty of provisions, enough to last for months.The Progress was carrying “1,940 pounds (880kg) of propellant, 110 pounds of oxygen, 926 pounds of water, and 3,128 pounds of spare parts, supplies and scientific experiment hardware”, Nasa said.The next delivery to the ISS is planned by SpaceX’s Dragon cargo ship on June 19.