A few minutes after liftoff on Wednesday, a Russian Progress resupply craft headed to the International Space Station (ISS) had a “loss of communication” and went down with a bang in Siberia, according to Russian wire reports.   Nobody’s in danger, but the sudden loss of the craft due to unknown causes brings an unwelcome spotlight both onto NASA’s near-term dependence upon Russian rocketry and quality control issues at the Russian Space Agency. Expect a lot of “I told you so” comments from Shuttle die-hards and politicians.  

The ISS Progress 44 resupply craft took off with nearly three tons of supply from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 9 a.m. EDT.   Communications with the vehicle was lost five minutes, 50 seconds after launch and Russian didn’t get confirmation of stage separation. 

Debris from the failed launch reportedly landed in south Siberia, according to RIA Novosti. A “powerful blast” was heard approximately 25 minutes after launch in South Siberian Choya District. The same story says the Progress failed to separate from the third stage of the Soyuz-U carrier rocket, which would have resulted in the combine parts failing to orbit reach orbit and coming back down to earth. 

In the U.S., the failure highlights NASA’s dependence upon Russia for crew transport and, to a lesser extent, cargo delivery to the ISS. But the bigger heartburn is no doubt at the Russian Space Agency, which has lost two high profile launches in under a week.   On August 18, the Express AM-4 communications satellite failed to separate from its Proton-M carrier rocket and got thrown into a useless orbit. 

NASA emphasized there are plenty of supplies to support the six-man crew at the space station and the station itself is in good shape, but the Russians have to figure out why the Progress/Soyuz-U rocket configuration went wrong. Since the Progress/Soyuz-U combo is the unmanned version of the manned three-person Soyuz crew capsule, the failure puts a damper both on crew launches and Russian cargo operations. 

ISS is stocked up with plenty of supplies thanks to STS-135, the last mission of the space shuttle program conducted in July, but NASA planners had conducted the operation as a hedge against further delays in the agency’s commercial cargo services program – not due to a Russian mishap.

Three of the current ISS crewmembers may stick around for a while on the station, rather than return to Earth on September 7. Until the failure with Progress 44 is clearly identified and a fix applied, a new crew won’t be going up since only the Russians can deliver people to low earth orbit (LEO) today. NASA currently has four commercial companies working on U.S. systems to deliver humans to LEO and the ISS, but Congress has yet to fully fund a system and the earliest a system could be tested is in 2015 – assuming full funding and NASA being able to provide a simple set of fixed requirements to private industry.

Cargo delivery to ISS is a much more optimistic picture.   The Europeans and Japanese are both providing cargo resupply vehicles, while NASA is placing (increasingly high) hopes on SpaceX demonstrating a successful rendezvous and berthing with the space station in early December, followed by Orbital Sciences (News - Alert) Corporation conducting a demo with its Taurus II/Cygnus combination in the first quarter of 2012.

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