A russian ship soyuz took off at dawn on Friday the 24th from Kazakhstan to the International Space Station (ISS) to return two Russian and one American astronauts to Earth in September whose capsule was damaged.
The MS-23 replacement spacecraft took off without people on board from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, according to a live video broadcast by NASA, which manages the ISS together with Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.
The spacecraft’s liftoff and orbit “proceeded normally,” Roscosmos said in a statement, which expects it to be docked at the space station on Feb. 26 at 01:01 GMT.
The launch of this device was initially scheduled for mid-March to carry a new crew of three to the ISS.
But in the end it remained empty to return the three stranded astronauts: the Russians Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Petelin and the American Frank Rubio.
In the absence of a crew to replace them, the mission of the three is extended until September, even if in principle they were supposed to return at the end of March. In total, they will spend a year in space instead of six months.
The two Russian cosmonauts and the American astronaut took off at the end of September 2022 with the Soyuz MS-22.
Usually the capsules with which the astronauts arrive at the ISS remain attached to the station during their entire stay in case they need an emergency evacuation. They also usually come back with the same device.
But in December, Soyuz MS-22 experimented a loss of refrigerant caused, according to Moscow, by the impact of a micrometeorite.
This accident caused fears about the temperature that could be reached inside the ship upon return to Earth.
The Russian space agency decided it could only be used in an emergency and sent the MS-23 spacecraft as a replacement to get the crew back in September.
MS-22 damaged must be released from the ISS and returned empty to Earth, a priori at the beginning of March.
A similar leak occurred in mid-February on another Russian ship, the Progress MS-21 freighter, which has been moored to the ISS since October. This was not meant to carry passengers and was undocked last week.
Roscosmos said on Tuesday that an “external impact” caused the leak and ruled out manufacturing errors.
In addition to the three crew members who arrived aboard Soyuz, the ISS currently has four other passengers, members of the Crew-5 mission and who arrived in a SpaceX Dragon capsule in October 2022.
The US company is to send its four replacements from the Crew-6 mission to the station on Monday: two NASA astronauts, an Emirati and a Russian cosmonaut.
After a transition of several days, Crew-5 will return to Earth.
The ISS is one of the few remaining areas of cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, which began a year ago.
Source: AFP
Source: Clarin
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