An Expensive Miss on a Russian Rocket

Given that we are now paying the Russians about $71 million per seat to get an astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS), maybe they felt a longer ride would give us more for our money.  That seems to be the case since the most recent Russian Soyuz space capture missed its connection with the ISS and the American and Russian passengers will have to wait another 36 hours before trying again.  The good news is that they are used to this longer trip, with the shorter 6 hour trip being a pretty new development since last year.

NASA's Steve Swanson and Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev are fine and everything should continue without a hitch.  The problem seems to be a software glitch that prevented a 24-second engine burn to align the capsule with the ISS.

We are lucky we still have the Russians to get passengers to the ISS until we can bring in our private sector partners.  SpaceX has another ISS resupply mission this weekend, so things are on track for the U.S. to be back in the space station transportation business.

Update:  The new ISS crew is safe and sound after a longer than expected delay.  NASA reported:

The new trio docked Thursday to the Poisk docking compartment at 7:53 p.m. EDT and opened the hatches less than two hours later to greet Commander Koichi Wakata and Flight Engineers Rick Mastracchio and Mikhail Tyurin. The sextet then gathered inside the Zvezda service module for a welcoming ceremony with words of congratulations from family members and mission officials.