Roscosmos To Launch Uncrewed Soyuz To Replace Damaged Spacecraft At ISS

Republished By Plato

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SEATTLE — Russia will launch a Soyuz spacecraft without a crew to the International Space Station in February after concluding a damaged Soyuz spacecraft docked there cannot safely return its crew to Earth.

In a statement Jan. 11, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft will launch to the ISS without a crew Feb. 20. It will replace the Soyuz MS-22 currently docked at the station, which will return to Earth uncrewed.

Soyuz MS-22 suffered a coolant leak Dec. 14 as Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk. The spacewalk was called off as coolant spewed from the leak for hours.

Roscosmos said in its statement that the hole in the coolant line was less than one millimeter in diameter. It said that it had been “experimentally proven” that a micrometeoroid impact caused the hole, but did not elaborate on how it reached that conclusion, including whether they had ruled out an orbital debris impact.

Soyuz MS-22 launched to the station Sept. 21 with Prokopyev, Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio on board. They were to remain on the station until March, when Soyuz MS-23 launched with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara. Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio would then return to Earth on Soyuz MS-22.

Under the new plan, Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio will extend their stays for an unspecified length, returning to Earth on Soyuz MS-23. Roscosmos did not announce when Kononenko, Chub and O’Hara would go to the station, presumably on Soyuz MS-24.

The announcement did not indicate if this would affect other missions to the station, including the SpaceX Crew-6 mission scheduled to launch in February. NASA is holding a briefing later Jan. 11 to provide more details about what it described in a media advisory as “the forward strategy for uninterrupted human operations aboard the International Space Station.”