The Progress launch scheduled to deliver supplies and propellant to ISS has failed. This is the second failure of a Russian launcher in a week — a Proton put a comsat in the wrong orbit on Friday.

I don’t know how big a problem this is for ISS, or when the next mission is scheduled. I assume they have a contingency plan, but it sure would be nice if SpaceX and Orbital can get operational soon. I think there will be a press conference in half an hour to discuss the situation.

[Update after press conference]
summary
Suffredini is saying that there’s plenty of margin for supplies, even if the next flight is delayed. I wonder if this will affect Soyuz launches?

[Update a few minutes later]

A summary of the presser from Keith Cowing:

Shortly after third stage ignition the spacecraft shut the engine down. The third stage and Progress subsequently crashed. Soyuz-FG (crew) and Soyuz-U (cargo) have similar third stage designs so this will have impact on the planned 22 September crew launch. We can go several months without a resupply vehicle if that becomes necessary. We have a 40-50 days of contingency beyond normal crew stay time. Eventually the Soyuz vehicle on orbit will ‘time out’ and have to come home. If the anomaly is solved the Progress flight in October could fly sooner.

Doesn’t sound like a crisis, but it would still be nice to get some American systems going.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I’m wondering if this had happened on a crewed launch, that they could have safely aborted?

[Update a few minutes later]

A couple more tweets from Jeff Foust: “Suffredini: agreement to fly up to 800 kg on SpaceX COTS C2/C3 flight, but had not been planning on using much of it.”
“Suffredini: not desirable, but could go through all of 2012 without CRS flights; hopeful at least one vehicle enters service next year.”

[Update a few minutes later]

This is really another demonstration of the folly of our space policy for the last half decade, when Mike Griffin took over. With the retirement of the Shuttle, and now this, we now have no, repeat no way to get astronauts to ISS. The ones there aren’t stranded — they can come back on the Soyuz that’s up there, but we can’t replace them until we resolve the issue with the Soyuz launcher. For an investment like this we should have redundant means of accessing it, and right now we have none, and even after we get it fixed, there will be no backup. If we had a sane policy we’d be doing everything possible to accelerate commercial crew. Instead, Congress wants to cut the funding for it, so they can feed it to a jobs program that has no hope of solving this problem for years, if ever.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, that was a short era:

“From today, the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight, the era of reliability,” the Russian space agency Roskosmos said in a statement.

Roskosmos expressed its admiration for the shuttle programme, which it said had delivered payloads to space indispensable for construction of the ISS.

“Mankind acknowledges the role of American space ships in exploring the cosmos,” it added.

But Roskosmos also used the occasion to tout the virtues of the Soyuz (Union) spacecraft, which unlike the shuttle lands on Earth vertically with the aid of parachutes after leaving orbit.

It said that there was a simple answer to why the Soyuz was still flying after the shuttles retired — “reliability and not to mention cost efficiency.”

It lashed out at what it said were foreign media descriptions of the Soyuz as old spaceships, saying the design was constantly being modernized.

Anyone want to take up a collection to have an order of crow delivered to Roscosmos?

[Update early afternoon]

A haiku:

Eating Crow

This was the era
Of reliability
Well so much for that