We consider the vacuum energy for a configuration of a sphere in front of a plane, both obeying the conductor boundary condition, at small separation. For the separation becoming small we derive the first next-to-leading order of the asymptotic expansion in the separation-to-radius ratio epsilon. This correction is of order epsilon. Opposite to the scalar cases it contains also contributions proportional to logarithms in first and second order, epsilon ln epsilon and epsilon(ln epsilon)(2). We compare this result with the available findings of numerical and experimental approaches.