The Soyuz spacecraft with the humanoid robot Fedor on board, the first to be sent by Russia into space, failed to dock on Saturday (August 24th) at the ISS. A new setback for the Russian space sector.

At 5:36 GMT, "the Russian cosmonauts ordered to abandon the stowage in automatic mode", originally scheduled for 5:30 GMT, after the Soyuz "could not enter the docking module Poïsk of the International Space Station, said NASA in a statement.

The unpiloted Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft has safely returned from the space station after its approach was aborted at 1:36 am ET. https://t.co/2igm0cn1Dr pic.twitter.com/FRWusLQNhk

Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) August 24, 2019

The Russian spacecraft then moved away at a "safe distance" from the ISS, awaiting guidance from the Russian Space Flight Control Center (Tsup) on its future actions, the source said. "The next attempt at stowage could take place no earlier than Monday morning, according to Russian controllers," Nasa said.

The live broadcast of the operations on the website of the Russian Space Agency (Roskosmos) was interrupted when the Soyuz was a hundred meters from the ISS.

Fedor had to stay ten days on the ISS

He was unable to dock at the scheduled time due to "failures" in the ISS docking system, said a source in the Russian space industry cited by the Russian public news agency RIA Novosti.

The ship carrying the robot took off on Thursday from the Russian cosmodrome Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Expected to arrive at the ISS on Saturday morning, Fedor, whose identification number is Skybot F850, was to stay there for ten days to return to Earth on September 7th.

>> Read: Fedor, the first humanoid robot, leaves Kazakhstan for space

This is a new disappointment for the Russian space sector which has chained in recent years humiliating accidents and corruption scandals. Thus, last October, an accident occurred on a Soyouz a few minutes after its take-off, forcing the astronauts on board - the American Nick Hague and his Russian colleague Alexey Ovchinin - to an emergency landing. This was the first failure in the history of manned ISS flights.

Russia, which remains the only country able to transport humans to the ISS, has been trying for several years to rebuild its space industry, a source of immense pride in the Soviet era, but which was ruined after fall of the USSR.

With AFP