Russian Spacecraft Suffers a Glitch: ISS Spacewalk May be Necessary

Russia, we have a problem. An unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft that launched toward the International Space Station yesterday encountered a serious issue. It failed to deploy an antenna used for navigation.

The spacecraft itself blasted off on top of a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur space station that Russia leases from Kazakhstan. The problem with the antenna occurred only moments after launch.

Named the Progress 51 supply spacecraft, the vessel may not even be able to dock with the ISS any longer. A news agency has reported that the protruding antenna could potentially create a space between the craft and the space station's hermetic seals. This would make opening the hatches too dangerous for the astronauts currently onboard the ISS.

This spells bad news for the astronauts currently in space. The Progress was slated to deliver 1,764 pounds of propellant, 57 pounds of air, 48 pounds of oxygen, 926 pounds of water and 3,348 pounds of experiment hardware, spare parts and other supplies to the residents of the space station, according to Space.com. In order to fix the problem, the crew would need to perform a spacewalk.

The $100 billion orbiting laboratory is crewed by six people, including Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn in addition to Russian cosmonauts Roman Romanenko, Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin. Recently, two of the Russian cosmonauts conducted a spacewalk, which made Vinogradov the world's oldest spacewalker at the age of 59.

"The Russian flight controllers are continuing to monitor the spacecraft and to determine if there is a way to get the antenna deployed," said NASA spokesman Josh Byerly in an interview with Space.com. "They are also analyzing ways to dock the Progress to the station in its current configuration, including having the crew perform a manual docking."

Currently, Russia's Roscosmos space agency is sending radio signals to the Progress in order to try and fix the problem remotely. It will continue to try to make contact with the spacecraft throughout Thursday afternoon.