NASA astronaut Ron Garan, whose return to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) was delayed due to the Progress freighter's failure last week, wrote a blues song about problems in space.
"Got those space station blues, don't know what I'm gonna do, just got a call on the phone, they say we ain't going home," sang Garan in a video clip uploaded on his YouTube channel.
In the video, showing the interiors of the ISS, Garan's colleague, Mike Fossum, travels through the station in search of the astronaut and finds him playing a guitar in the Soyuz segment docked on the top of the station.
"That's all I've got so far, but the good news is I've got a lot of time to work on the song now. Check back in about two months, and it should be done. You know where to find me," Garan tells Fossum.
The Progress M-12M space freighter carrying food and other items to the ISS fell in South Siberia's Altai Republic on August 24 after failing to separate from its Soyuz-U carrier rocket, the first loss of a Progress freighter in the history of Russia's space industry.
"I wanted to do something light-hearted to let everyone know that we are all in this together, so I enlisted Mike Fossum to help me make a video poking a little fun at the situation," Garan said in a comment to the video.
Progress's loss became the fourth major mishap of Russian aerospace industry over the last nine months. In December, 2010, a Proton-M booster rocket failed to put three Glonass-M satellites into orbit. The launch of the Rokot booster rocket, carrying a military geodesic satellite Geo-IK-2 ended in failure in February.
On August 18, a Russian Proton-M rocket lost the prized Express-AM4 satellite that was designed to provide digital television and secure government communications for Siberia and the Far East. One week after the Express-AM4 went off course, a Soyuz-U booster malfunctioned, preventing the Progress M-12M cargo spacecraft from reaching orbit.
