P25 will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It is scheduled to dock with the station Tuesday, May 15, at about 1:10 a.m.

The spacecraft will use the automated Kurs system to dock at the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module. Expedition 15 flight engineer Oleg Kotov will be at the manual Toru docking system controls, should his intervention become necessary.

Expedition 15 crew members, Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineers Sunita Williams and Kotov, will continue to use oxygen from the Progress 24 at the Pirs Docking Compartment. It is scheduled to remain there until mid-August.

Once its cargo is unloaded, P25 will be filled with trash and station discards. It is scheduled to be undocked, deorbited and incinerated on re-entry on July 20.

The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth. The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical.

But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the third is called the orbital module.

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