Progress success

Progress M-13M/45 launched on 30/10 and docked to the Pirs module of the ISS on 2/11 with no anomalies, a great relief to everyone! The crew will get some iPads (lucky them!). (NASASpaceflight.com: “Progress successfully docks to ISS; stage set for return of manned Soyuz flight”.) The next crew to launch in November will be ISS-29/30.

The Mars-500 experiment ends this week, 4 November! The crew seem to have survived with their sanity intact :-).

China’s launch of the Tiangong 1 space station module on 29/9 was successful. On 31/10 Shenzhou 8 was launched, an unmanned version of the capsule, and remotely docked to Tiangong on 2/11.

The Phobos-Grunt probe is set to launch next week, 8 or 9 November, if there are no delays – the launch window is from 5-25 November, otherwise there are another 2 years or so until the next Mars launch opportunity. It has what appears to be an official website.

I decided not to buy the Spaceflight issues mentioned last entry as they were speculative only, and the magazine too expensive.

Chinese spacesuit

“Suits For Shenzhou”, Space Daily, 5/5. The spacesuits that will be used for the Chinese spacewalk are derived from the Russian Orlan spacesuit. It’s not clear whether these are Chinese-made, or purchased from Russia.

In this week’s edition of The Space Review, there are two articles about available space magazines: “Dead trees and the final frontier” and “A quick guide to space news publications in print”. The only spaceflight-specific magazine available in Australia that I know of is Spaceflight – I quit buying it a few years ago because it got too expensive (now over $10), and most articles tend not to be of interest to me. Novosti Kosmonavtiki seems to be the best one, but it is not available in an English translation.

Not much more information on the cause of the Soyuz TMA-11 rough landing. Russian Space Web notes that the TMA-12 relocation from one port to another (Pirs to Zarya) is canceled (there is a remote possibility that the crew would have to abandon the ISS if anything went wrong, and they don’t want to risk another ballistic landing). A contingency spacewalk might be undertaken to inspect one of the pyrotechnic locks that separate the modules before descent. Yi So-yeon also suffered unspecified back injuries from the landing as she was on the side that hit the ground hardest (FPSpace May 2008).