A little while ago, the Progress MS-25 spacecraft docked with the International Space Station in the mission also referred to as Progress 85 or 85P. The Russian cargo spacecraft, which blasted off last Friday, December 1, carries food, water, scientific experiments, fuel, and various hardware. The Progress spacecraft have an automatic docking system but in case of problems, the cosmonauts on board the Station take control of it and that’s what happened today to complete the maneuver.

The Progress MS-25 cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s Russian Poisk module. Today, the crew will probably proceed with the hatch opening and the procedures to make it an appendage to the Station. The Progress MS-25’s primary mission is accomplished. In fact, it can’t return to Earth, so it will be filled with pieces of hardware that are faulty or have become unusable for some reason and assorted garbage and will disintegrate coming back to the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Progress MS-25 space freighter is scheduled to remain docked with the International Space Station for over six months. The date for its departure will be set later this year by the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The journey of the Progress MS-25 went regularly and that’s positive for Roscosmos considering the delays in its programs, which sometimes lead to failures in some space missions.

For the International Space Station, the beginning of 2024 could mark the arrival of more space cargoes that are a little less normal following plans that are still decidedly provisional. The arrival of a Cygnus space cargo ship is certainly nothing new but the NG-20 mission currently scheduled for January will be launched using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket while waiting for the new version of the Antares rocket to be ready. The HTV-X1 mission, which the Japanese space agency JAXA had postponed to January 2024, will instead be something really new with the Japanese HTV-X space cargo ship at its debut. In this case, however, there’s also the problem that the HTV-X cargo spacecraft will be launched atop the H3 rocket, also new, whose test launch in March 2023 failed. For this reason, JAXA is expected to set a new tentative date for the first launch of the HTV-X cargo spacecraft.