A mission is being launched by Russia to rescue stranded space station crew members
The delay of the launch of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft due to the leak on Progress 82 and the problem with the Roscosmos Space Mission
Roscosmos said in its Telegram post that it would delay the Soyuz MS-23 launch while the agency investigated the cause of the Progress vehicle’s coolant leak.
The new plan was to have the astronauts and two cosmonauts fly back to Earth in a vehicle that would be functional.
The spacecraft will carry roughly 948 pounds of cargo to the space station, including food and equipment for experiments. Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin will then fly home in the MS-23 in several months. They were slated to leave by the end of March but NASA said in January that their missions would last until September.
The Russian Mission Control Center in Moscow decided to delay the launch of the MS-23 because of the leak on Progress 82, but it was not related to the rescue mission.
The new images of the vehicle show that it sustained external damage, which is believed to have caused the leak.
The space agency is launching a flight to give a ride to two men and one woman on the International Space Station.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin arrived at the International Space Station in September aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz MS-22, which remained docked at the space station.
The status of the Roscosmos civil space program after the Soyuz leak and the impact of micrometeoroids on Earth
The engineers determined that the craft would not be viable for a normal mission back to Earth. It’s still available even in an emergency from the space station.
Roscosmos announced on Monday that a state commission had issued a permit approving the launch of the replacement ship, the Russian state news agency TASS reported.
The demise of the Russian civil space program is being seen by Bruce McClintock, who was the defence attache at the US embassy in Moscow. Russian leaders prioritized their military space program over their civilian program around 10 years ago, McClintock says.
While Roscosmos officials did not respond to interview requests, the agency has been public about its recent technical issues: The Soyuz MS-22 docked at the ISS suffered a coolant leak on December 14, 2022, and astronauts inspected it with the space station’s robotic arm, Canadarm2. The planned spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts was canceled because of the leak.
Zak points out that micrometeoroid impacts in Earth orbit have been exceedingly rare. He thinks there’s no chance of the two coolingsystems of the space station being damaged by meteorites in a short period of time.
