Russia launched an uncrewed Soyuz to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, February 24, 2023. This Soyuz (MS-23) is a replacement for Soyuz MS-22, which sprang a very visible coolant leak in December. It had successfully delivered three astronauts to the ISS in September 2022 before getting hit with a micrometeoroid while docked at the space station. Since then, the space travelers – Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio – have been aboard ISS without a designated ship to get home.
Their new ride – Soyuz MS-23 – docked successfully at 7:58 p.m. ET Saturday, February 25 (00:58 UTC on Sunday, February 26) at the ISS’s Poisk module. It didn’t arrive empty-handed. The uncrewed capsule carried 946 pounds (429 kg) of supplies. NASA reported the leaky spacecraft will return to Earth for inspection:
The damaged Soyuz MS-22 is scheduled to undock from the station in late March and return to Earth for an uncrewed parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan, and post-flight analysis by Roscosmos.
The crew’s mission was supposed to end in March. Now, the astronauts will remain onboard until September, even once they receive the new Soyuz at the ISS. Space.com reported that the reason they are extending their stay in orbit an extra six months is that:
… the next Soyuz [the Soyuz that launched Friday] will stay docked at the ISS until its successor – a vehicle that will carry crew – is ready to go.
Roscosmos had been planning to send up another uncrewed ship to the ISS for the “stranded” crew to return home in. (Other vessels currently docked at ISS could squeeze them in with the four other crew members currently at ISS, but that option isn’t ideal).
Roscosmos officially declared the date of the uncrewed ship launch official this past Monday (February 20), when the Russian state news agency TASS reported that the State Commission formally granted a permit for launch.
The Soyuz MS-23 successfully launched from Russia in the early hours of Friday, February 24, which was Thursday evening, February 23 in the Western Hemisphere.
The Soyuz MS-23 launch was originally scheduled for February 20, but faced a delay due to a second leaky spacecraft.
A 2nd leak, in a 2nd craft
In February, Roscosmos detected a second spacecraft docked at the ISS was also leaking. This second spacecraft is a supply ship named Progress 82 and known as Progress MS-21 to the Russians. The supply ship launched back on October 28, 2022, and reached the ISS without incident and docked successfully.
After discovering the leak on February 11, engineers undocked Progress 82 from the ISS on February 18. They took photos to inspect the craft. Then, loaded with trash, Progress 82 fired its engine to de-orbit. Less than an hour later, it impacted in the Southern Pacific Ocean. (This area is nicknamed the spacecraft cemetery, because it is an uninhabited area targeted for re-entry of spacecraft such as the former Mir space station.)
Roscosmos believes the sources of both leaks are tiny bits of rock and other material in space (micrometeoroids). On February 21, Anatoly Zak at RussianSpaceWeb.com reported that Roscosmos said:
Based on the preliminary assessment of the situation with Progress MS-21 at RKK Energia, the cargo ship had experienced an external impact … This conclusion was made based the photos which revealed changes on the exterior of the vehicle … the holes discovered (on the photos after undocking) had not been seen either during the manufacturing of the Progress MS-21 at the factory, nor during its preparation for launch, nor during its flight and docking with the ISS.
Despite two recent leaks due to possible micrometeoroid strikes, all sources agree that the likelihood of another impact to the soon-to-launch Soyuz MS-23 is low.
Bottom line: On Friday, February 24, 2023, Russia successfully launched a replacement Soyuz spacecraft for the stranded ISS crew to eventually ride home in.
Award-winning reporter and editor Dave Adalian's love affair with the cosmos began during a long-ago summer school trip to the storied and venerable Lick Observatory atop California's Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose in the foggy Diablos Mountain Range and far above Monterey Bay at the edge of the endless blue Pacific Ocean. That field trip goes on today, as Dave still pursues his nocturnal adventures, perched in the darkness at his telescope's eyepiece or chasing wandering stars through the fields of night with the unaided eye.A lifelong resident of California's Tulare County - an agricultural paradise where the Great San Joaquin Valley meets the Sierra Nevada in endless miles of grass-covered foothills - Dave grew up in a wilderness larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, one choked with the greatest diversity of flora and fauna in the US, one which passes its nights beneath pitch black skies rising over the some of highest mountain peaks and greatest roadless areas on the North American continent.Dave studied English, American literature and mass communications at the College of the Sequoias and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked as a reporter and editor for a number of news publications on- and offline during a career spanning nearly 30 years so far. His fondest literary hope is to share his passion for astronomy and all things cosmic with anyone who wants to join in the adventure and explore the universe's past, present and future.
Bottom line: On Friday, February 24, 2023, Russia successfully launched a replacement Soyuz spacecraft for the stranded ISS crew to eventually ride home in.
In the front row (from left) are, Expedition 69 Flight Engineer Frank Rubio with Ax-2 crew mates Peggy Whitson, Ali Alqarni, John Shoffner, and Rayyanah Barnawi. In the back (from left) are, Expedition 69 crew mates Andrey Fedyaev, Sultan Alneyadi, Dmitri Petelin, Sergey Prokopyev, Woody Hoburg, and Stephen Bowen.
To prevent such a catastrophe in space from happening once more, the space station will be deorbited in 2031, bringing it through the atmosphere to safely splash down in the Pacific Ocean.
The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has successfully launched a Soyuz spacecraft to bring back three astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) after their Soyuz capsule sprang a coolant leak. The two Russian and an American astronaut will board the empty Soyuz spacecraft to return to Earth.
Feb 21 (Reuters) - Russia said on Tuesday that three astronauts left stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) by a leak on their return capsule last year would land back on Earth in a Soyuz MS-23 replacement capsule in September.
How long do astronauts stay on the ISS? The average mission length for an astronaut is six months or 182 days, but the amount of time varies based on their mission.
Cracks have started to appear in the Zarya cargo module. There has also been a series of air leaks in the crew's living quarters. This structural fatigue is part of the reason the ISS will be vacated in 2030 and de-orbited the following year.
Last year, NASA announced that the station's operations would end in 2030, after which it will fall into the Pacific Ocean. Another factor that could limit the lifespan of the ISS is tensions between Russia and the other entities operating the station—which include the United States, Europe, Japan and Canada.
The total flight duration of the crew had been 570.22 hours and involved 383 orbits—18 prior to docking, 362 docked, and three after undocking. However, when the recovery team opened the capsule of the Soyuz 11, they found all three men dead.
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov, (born March 16, 1927, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R. —died April 24, 1967, Kazakhstan), Soviet cosmonaut, the first man known to have died during a space mission. Komarov joined the Soviet air force at the age of 15 and was educated in air force schools, becoming a pilot in 1949.
One of the three astronauts is NASA's Francisco Rubio.Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, the other two, are Russian cosmonauts. They were due to end their mission in March. Two months ago, they were stuck when the cooling system of their Soyuz MS-22 capsule started leaking.
Russia tells NASA it will remain with International Space Station until at least 2028. Russian space officials told their U.S. counterparts that Moscow expects to remain on the International Space Station at least until their own outpost in orbit is built in 2028, NASA's space operations chief told Reuters.
The uncrewed Soyuz MS-23, which launched on Thursday (Feb. 23) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, will serve as the new ride home for cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.
However, one means of travel to and from the ISS is Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, which is operated solely in Russian, so astronauts have to be proficient in that language too.
Pay grades for civilian astronauts are GS-11 through GS-14 with GS-11 starting at $64,724 per year and GS-14 earning up to $141,715 annually. However, the GS rates often have specific local rates that may differ from this.
The astronaut crew is only a small fraction of the number of people operating, controlling and maintaining ISS. While astronauts operate in shifts, and usually (though not always) at the same time, periods when everyone on the station is asleep aren't anything infrequent.
The decommissioning plan for space station is the execution of a controlled targeted deorbit into a remote ocean area. During descent through the Earth's atmosphere, the space station would burn, break up, and vaporize into fragments of various sizes.
NASA has announced plans for the International Space Station (ISS) to be officially decommissioned in 2031. After dozens of launches since 1998 got the station up and into orbit, bringing it down will be a feat of its own—and the risks are serious if things go wrong.
SpaceX will launch what it is calling the world's first commercial space station as early as 2025 with the goal of eventually developing a multi-module base. The space station, called the Vast Haven-1, will launch as early as August 2025 on a Falcon 9 rocket to low-Earth orbit, according to SpaceX.
NASA plans to begin assembling this space station, dubbed the Lunar Gateway, in 2024, and it expects it to play a pivotal role in its plans to maintain a human presence on the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars and beyond.
Yuri Borisov, whom President Vladimir Putin appointed last month to head Roscosmos, has said Russia will quit the ISS after 2024 and is working to develop its own orbital station.
NASA currently spends about $3.1 billion a year on the space station program, with more than $1.3 billion going to operations of the station and research performed there, and nearly $1.8 billion on crew and cargo transportation.
They're paying $55 million apiece for the rocket ride and accommodations, all meals included. Russia has been hosting tourists at the space station — and before that the Mir station — for decades. Just last fall, a Russian movie crew flew up, followed by a Japanese fashion tycoon and his assistant.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the ISS. The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada.
Three Soviet cosmonauts — Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patasayev — were making their descent to Earth after a record-breaking time spent aboard the Salyut 1 space station, where they performed experiments and explored the then many unknowns of human space habitation.
The command module of Apollo 13 entered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down on target on April 17 at 1:07 PM Eastern Standard Time. The mission has been referred to as a successful failure, in that all the crew members survived a catastrophic accident.
Listen to Komarov as the Soyuz capsule began to fail. On the Internet (89 cents at Amazon.com) I found what may have been Komarov's last words: Some translators hear him say, "Heat is rising in the capsule." He also uses the word "killed" — presumably to describe what the engineers had done to him.
The first astronaut to float away from the safety of their ship without a tether was Bruce McCandless, who reached 320 feet away from the Challenger space shuttle on February 7, 1984.
Krikalev was stranded on board the Mir during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As the country that had sent him into space no longer existed, his return was delayed and he stayed in space for 311 consecutive days, twice as long as the mission had originally called for.
Soviet cosmonauts never orbited nor landed on the Moon. Details of both Soviet programs were kept secret until 1990 when the government allowed them to be published under the policy of glasnost.
Frank Rubio, NASA's first Salvadoran American to go to space, is currently stuck on the International Space System after their spacecraft got a coolant leak. He might be stuck there for a full year, but the astronaut is staying positive. In a recent interview he assured that there will be new opportunities for Latinos.
The International Space Station is a co-operative programme between Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada, and Japan for the joint development, operation and utilisation of a permanently inhabited Space Station in low Earth orbit.
Yuri Gagarin became the first Soviet and the first human to reach space, on Vostok 1. Alan Shepard became the first American to reach space, on Freedom 7. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to go into space and to orbit the Earth.
Project CIMON, which was commissioned by the German Space Agency at DLR and developed by Airbus and IBM, is a project providing the first artificially intelligent assistant aboard the orbiting laboratory. This voice-controlled robot is designed to act as a hands-free database, computer, and camera to support research.
There are three toilets on the International Space Station, located in the Zvezda , Nauka and Tranquility modules. They use a fan-driven suction system similar to the Space Shuttle WCS. Liquid waste is collected in 20-litre (5.3 US gal) containers.
Following a five-month stay aboard the International Space Station, the four members of NASA's SpaceX Crew-5 mission are safely back on Earth and will answer questions in a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, March 15.
SpaceX Crew-5 was the fifth operational NASA Commercial Crew Program flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft, and the eighth overall crewed orbital flight. The mission launched on 5 October 2022 and transported four crew members to the International Space Station (ISS), docking there on 6 October 2022 at 21:01 UTC.
Introduction: My name is Geoffrey Lueilwitz, I am a zealous, encouraging, sparkling, enchanting, graceful, faithful, nice person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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