Roscosmos Confirms MS-14 Spacecraft’s Docking to ISS Scheduled for August 27

Note: Photo for illustration purposes.

Roscosmos has confirmed that the second attempt to dock the Soyuz MS-14 Russian spacecraft, on board of which is the Fedor robot and cargo, with the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled for 06:12 Moscow time on Tuesday, August 27. This is stated in a message published on Sunday on the website of Roscosmos, TASS reported.

Earlier, a repeated attempt to dock the Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft with the ISS scheduled for Tuesday morning, NASA reported.

“In order to ensure conditions for docking on Monday, August 26, it is planned to re-launch the Soyuz MS-13 manned spacecraft from the Zvezda service module to the Search small research module of the ISS Russian segment,” the report says.

“The estimated time of separation of the Soyuz MS-13 from the Zvezda module is 06:34 Moscow time, docking to the Search is at 06:59 Moscow time [Monday, August 26],” the state corporation said. “The operation will last about 25 minutes. Docking will be done manually by the ship’s commander Alexander Skvortsov with the participation of flight engineers Luke Parmitano and Andrew Morgan.”

“This operation will be carried out with the aim of releasing the docking unit of the Zvezda service module, which the Soyuz MS-14 ship should dock to on August 27, 2019 at 06:12 Moscow time,” noted the Russian Space Agency. They added that on Sunday the crew will conduct aboard the ISS training on the upcoming re-launch and re-conservation of the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft.

The docking of the Soyuz MS-14 was to take place on Saturday at 08:30 Moscow time. However, after approaching the station, the ship began to move away from it.

During the NASA broadcast, the speaker said that the docking was interrupted due to problems with the amplifier of the Kurs automatic docking system onboard the station.

He specified that in manual mode the astronauts could not dock the ship due to the lack of the necessary system onboard the Soyuz. As noted on Sunday at NASA, the Course system on the Star module has been tested and works “perfectly”.