On May 16, 2014 at 01:42 Moscow time (on May 15 at 21:42 UTC) the Russian “Proton-M” rocket-carrier was launched from Baykonur Cosmodrome. The rocket carrying an Express-AM4R communication satellite burned up in the atmosphere above China, with no debris reaching the Earth. The rocket had an engine problem at the 540th second after launch. Roscosmos said all components of the rocket, the Briz-M booster and the satellite, as well as fuel, burned up during re-entry to the atmosphere.

 

On May 14, 2014 at 01:57 UTC the Russian “Soyuz TMA-11M” landing capsule landed safely in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft delivered to Earth the 3 members of ISS’s Expedition 39 – Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, American astronaut Richard Mastracchio and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata They spent in space 187 days, 21 hours, 44 minutes.

photo by NASA

Three other ISS crew members – Russian cosmonauts Aleksandr Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev as well as American astronaut Steven Swanson remained in orbit aboard the International Space Station as the Expedition 40 crew. The undocking ... Read more »