Two Russians and an American stuck on the ISS due to a meteorite: they will have to send an empty ship for them

Russia will send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station in February to bring home three cosmonauts. The ship they were supposed to land on was damaged by the impact of a tiny meteorite.Voice of America".

Photo: IStock

The Russian space agency Roskosmos made the announcement after testing the flightworthiness of a Soyuz MS-22 crew capsule docked at the ISS that leaked coolant in December.

Representatives of Roscosmos and NASA at a joint press briefing said that on February 20, the Soyuz MS-23 unmanned spacecraft will be launched to the station, on which cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergey Prokopiev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio will return to Earth.

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"We don't call it a rescue Soyuz," said Joel Montalbano, space station program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. – I call it the spare Soyuz.

“At the moment, the crew is safe aboard the space station,” he added.

The MS-22 carried Petelin, Prokopiev and Rubio to the ISS in September after taking off from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, reports PhysOrg. They were supposed to return home on the same ship in March, but now their stay on the ISS will be extended by a few more months.

“I might have to find some more ice cream to reward them,” Montalbano joked.

The MS-22 began leaking coolant on December 14, shortly before the Russian cosmonauts were due to begin their spacewalk. MS-22 was hit by a tiny space rock.

Montalbano said "everything points to a micrometeoroid" and not to space junk or a technical problem.

Sergei Krikalev, executive director of the Roscosmos manned space flight program, said "the current theory is that this damage was caused by a small particle about one millimeter in diameter."

According to Krikalev, the decision was made to use the MS-23 to ferry the current crew home due to concerns about possible high temperatures in the damaged MS-22 upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. He said the MS-22 could still potentially be used "in an emergency."

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Another emergency scenario involves the use of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which is currently docked to the ISS after four astronauts were flown to the space station for a six-month mission in October.

Montalbano said talks are underway with SpaceX to use the Crew Dragon capsule to bring other astronauts home aboard the ISS.

“All this is only as a last resort, only if we have to evacuate the ISS,” a NASA representative emphasized. “It’s not a nominal plan or anything like that.”

Space has been a rare platform for cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the beginning of the Russian attack on Ukraine and the subsequent Western sanctions against Russia.

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The ISS was launched in 1998 during the expansion of cooperation between the US and Russia after the "space race" of the Cold War.

Russia has been using outdated but reliable Soyuz capsules to carry astronauts into space since the 1960s.

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