09.10.08
A new Progress cargo carrier launched to the International Space Station at 3:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday with almost 2.7 tons of fuel, air, water, propellant and other supplies and equipment aboard.
Image above: The ISS Progress 30 cargo craft poised atop its Soyuz rocket on the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: Roscosmos.
The station's 30th Progress unpiloted spacecraft brings to the orbiting laboratory more than 1,900 pounds of propellant, more than 110 pounds of oxygen, almost 465 pounds of water and 2,865 pounds of dry cargo. Total cargo weight is 5,357 pounds.
P30 replaces the trash-filled P29 which was undocked from the Earth-facing port of the Zarya module on Sept. 1 and deorbited for destruction in the Earth's atmosphere on Sept. 8.
P30 will use the automated Kurs system to dock to the aft port of the station's Zvezda service module. Expedition 17 Commander Sergei Volkov will be at the manual TORU docking system controls, should his intervention become necessary.
Once the cargo is unloaded, P30 will be filled with trash and station discards. It will be undocked from the station and like its predecessors deorbited to burn in the Earth's atmosphere.
The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth. The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical.
But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the third is called the orbital module.
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