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A resupply mission for the International Space Station, Progress MS-11, took off yesterday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, finally docking with the space station and providing its residents with more than 5,400 pounds of supplies. In many ways, it was just like the countless replenishment missions done before, but it was very special.
The mission, which was carried out by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, took only three hours and 21 minutes to move from Earth to a successful docking with the ISS. It's incredibly fast, and it's now the fastest journey of the International Space Station, beating the previous record by 19 minutes (also established by a Progress replenishment spacecraft).
The feat was enough for NASA residents aboard the ISS to notice, with astronaut Nick Hague describing the achievement as impressive.
To get from Earth to the International Space Station, the replenishment spacecraft must make several orbits of the Earth, but the number of times it ends the orbit may vary. For a while, supply ships did dozens of orbits before catching up with the ISS, but all of this changed relatively recently with the "accelerated" launches that allow the ship to capture the "dead". ISS in just two rotations.
This modification significantly shortens the time needed for refueling to get to the ISS, which saves time in Roscosmos and expedites the delivery of items such as food, water and oxygen. The MS-11 Progress Replenishment mission delivered all this and more, with record flight time.
Russia and NASA have been working for some time now to make replenishment missions work as efficiently as possible, and we are just starting to see the fruits of this work with faster missions. For the future, it is not certain that there is much more time to save time, but you can bet that Roscosmos will try.
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