Russia said on Wednesday it would launch another Soyuz spacecraft next month to bring two of its cosmonauts and an American astronaut home from the International Space Station after their original capsule was hit by a micrometeoroid and started leaking.
Last month’s leak came from a small puncture — less than 1 millimeter wide — in the external cooling system of the Soyuz MS-22 capsule, one of two reentry capsules attached to the ISS that can return crew members home.
“After analyzing the state of the spacecraft, thermal calculations and technical documentation, it was concluded that MS-22 should land without a crew on board,” said Yuriy Borisov, head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.
Russia said a new capsule, the Soyuz MS-23, would be launched on February 20 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22, which will be returned to Earth empty. The new capsule will have to fly to the ISS and in autopilot mode.
The original plan was for MS-23 to launch in March with two Russians and one American to replace the three already there. This new crew will now have to wait until late summer or fall to fly when another capsule is ready for them.
The crew is “safe aboard the space station,” NASA says
Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitry Petelin and American astronaut Francisco Rubio were supposed to end their mission in March, but now they will extend it by a few more months and return aboard MS-23.
“They are willing to accept whatever solution we give them,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager, told a news conference. “I might have to fly in some more ice cream to reward them,” he added.
If an emergency arises in the meantime, Roscosmos said it would check whether the MS-22 spacecraft could be used to rescue the crew. In this scenario, temperatures in the capsule can reach unhealthy levels of 30-40 degrees Celsius.
“In the event of an emergency, when the crew will have a real threat to the life of the station, then probably the danger of staying on the station may be higher than falling into an unhealthy Soyuz,” Sergey Krikalev, the Russian head of the crewed space program, said .
NASA took part in all the discussions and agreed to the plan.
“The crew is currently safe aboard the space station,” NASA program manager Joel Montalbano said. “There is no immediate need for the crew to go home today.”
There are a total of seven residents on the space station, and the crew cannot rely on MS-22 if they encounter another emergency, such as a fire or decompression.
In addition to Prokopiev, Petelin and Rubio, the space station is home to NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Kasada, Russia’s Anna Kikina and Japan’s Koichi Wakata, who boarded a SpaceX capsule last October.
NASA said it was considering adding additional crew to the capsule, the only other “lifeboat” vehicle currently docked at the station.
“We are prepared for this situation,” says Roscosmos
The incident disrupted operations on Russia’s ISS, forcing its cosmonauts to cancel spacewalks as officials focused on the leaked capsule.
Both NASA and Roscosmos believe the leak was caused by a micrometeoroid – a small particle of space rock – hitting the capsule at high speed.
“Space is not a safe place and it is not a safe environment. We have meteorites, we have vacuum and we have high temperature and we have complex hardware that can fail,” Krikalev said.
“Now we are faced with one of the scenarios … we are prepared for this situation.”
The issue comes during the 11th month of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has sparked the biggest crisis in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Moscow has used its space program since the invasion in February to show support for its troops.
The Soyuz rocket, launched in March 2022, was emblazoned with a large letter “Z”, known as the main symbol of Russia’s aggression against its neighbor.
In early July 2022, cosmonauts Oleg Artemiev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov shared photos of themselves aboard the ISS holding the flags of the so-called “people’s republics” of Donetsk Luhansk, two territories in Ukraine’s Donbas that Russia has since unilaterally annexed despite protests of the international community.
On December 21, the former director of Roscosmos and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Rogozin, was seriously injured while celebrating his birthday in Moscow-occupied Donetsk.
Rogozin, who was replaced as head of Russia’s national space agency on July 16, 2022, is known as one of the most ardent supporters of the war in Ukraine.
New chief Yuri Borisov said earlier that Russia plans to withdraw from the ISS program in 2024 and build its own space station.
Neither Roscosmos nor NASA have commented on the ongoing tensions between Moscow and Washington in the context of the Soyuz crisis.
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