The Soyuz spacecraft with the humanoid robot Fedor, the first to be sent by Russia into space, failed to dock on Saturday at the International Space Station (ISS), another setback for the Russian space sector.
An emergency meeting underway
Scheduled for 5:30 GMT in automatic mode, the stowage did not take place and the ship had to move away from the ISS at a "safe distance", said Russian news agencies quoting the Russian Control Center space flights (Tsoup). The live broadcast of the stowage on the website of the Russian Space Agency (Roskosmos) was interrupted when the Soyuz was located at a distance of one hundred meters from the Station.
The ship was unable to dock at the scheduled time because of "failures" in the ISS's docking system, according to a source in the Russian space industry cited by the public press agency RIA Novosti. An emergency meeting to decide on a possible second attempt at stowage was under way at the Space Flight Control Center, according to the same source.
A series of disappointments
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.
The ship carrying the robot took off 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.
This robot, with a silver anthropomorphic body, is 1.80 meters high and weighs 160 kg. Its name corresponds to the acronym for "Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research" and refers to the Russian name Fyodor. He has accounts on social networks Instagram and Twitter, which detail his daily life, for example when he learns to open a bottle of water.