Russia is assessing the airworthiness of its spacecraft docked at the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, after an impressive leak last week, and has been considering a rescue mission for the stranded crew members.
Coolant from the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft began leaking into space on December 14. In the images released by NASA, we can clearly see a jet of particles escaping from the back of the vehicle.
Damage assessment is being done, Sergei Krikalev, director of human spaceflight at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said during a news conference organized by the US space agency on Thursday.
If thermal analysis—which assesses the temperature inside the cabin—concludes that the MS-22 spacecraft is unsuitable to accommodate a crew, another Soyuz capsule launch scheduled for mid-March from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Russia’s launch base in Kazakhstan, could upgrade the capsule. It will join the International Space Station without a crew, he said.
“They plan to send the next Soyuz vehicle at the end of February,” added NASA ISS Administrator Joel Montalbano, who was also on the call.
If that happens, the damaged spacecraft will return to Earth without a crew.
The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft brought home two Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petlin, as well as American astronaut Frank Rubio, in September.
There are currently seven people aboard the International Space Station, but if the MS-22 spacecraft is deemed inoperable, that also means that the space station will have one rescue craft, capable of carrying just four people, in case it must be evacuated. .
Russian Anna Kikina, Americans Nicole Mann and Josh Kasada, and Japanese Koichi Wakata arrived aboard a Dragon capsule from the American company SpaceX in October.
He added that more work was still needed to determine whether the problem was caused by small, naturally occurring meteorites, man-made debris in orbit, or a hardware malfunction.
The International Space Station is one of the few areas of cooperation still underway between Moscow and Washington since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, launched on February 24, and ensuing Western sanctions.
The International Space Station was launched in 1998 at a time of US-Russian cooperation, in the wake of the space race in which the two countries engaged during the Cold War.
