SpaceX’s Astronaut Taxi Could Get a Shield Upgrade.
NASA will ask SpaceX to boost existing shielding on the company’s Crew Dragon capsule after a small hole in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft explodes in December 2022, agency officials said during a press conference Wednesday (Jan. 25). is considering.
It was probably struck by a micrometeoroid while the Soyuz was docked to the International Space Station (ISS), where it remains today. The impact caused a coolant leak that made the Soyuz vehicle, known as MS-22, unsafe to carry the astronauts home except in emergencies.
So Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has decided to launch an empty Soyuz on February 20 to bring the three MS-22 crew members back to Earth. The trip is expected to take place in September, about six months after the trio’s original planned homecoming date.
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Discussions with SpaceX are at an early stage; Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said the shield-boost idea was raised at a regularly scheduled commercial crew meeting Tuesday (Jan. 24).
“We started talking a little bit – can we do something now?” he said at Wednesday’s press conference, which provided an update on ISS operations and the next SpaceX mission to the station, Crew-6, which is scheduled to launch on February 26.
Sarah Walker of SpaceX said the company is in line with NASA’s goals. Walker, who is Dragon’s director of mission management, also emphasized that all analysis so far shows Crew Dragon docked to the ISS, called Endurance, is doing just fine.
“The Dragon systems are healthy and operating nominally,” Walker said Wednesday during Endurance’s press conference, which launched to the orbiting lab last October on SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission for NASA.
Roscosmos officials say the damaged Soyuz MS-22 can accommodate two of its three crew members in case an emergency requires evacuating the ISS. However, without coolant the ride back to Earth would be hot. The two cosmonauts traveling on MS-22 are Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. The third crew member, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, will join the four Crew-5 astronauts on the Endurance in a “lifeboat” scenario.
Agency officials said Wednesday that NASA considered a number of safety questions before approving Rubio’s seat liner for endurance from the Soyuz MS-22, including making sure the SpaceX craft had enough oxygen, carbon The dioxide can be reduced and the landing will take place safely. ,
SpaceX originally designed the Crew Dragon vehicle to carry up to seven people. But the Endurance was outfitted with only four seats, and securing Rubio as an unexpected fifth crew member required clever repurposing of supplies in orbit.
“We actually looked at taking some of the cargo straps off the CRS-26 vehicle that’s docked to the ISS right now,” Stich said, referring to the SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule. Then were able to strap over the seat liner and then secure it to the floor of the Dragon.”
The empty Soyuz vehicle, known as MS-23, will launch during a stretch that NASA associate administrator Kathy Lueders called “one of the busiest increments in the station’s history” during Wednesday’s press conference.
Crew flight tests are among several scheduled launches to the ISS in the first half of 2022, the first astronaut missions for Boeing’s Starliner capsule; SpaceX’s Crew-6; and Ax-2, the second crewed mission to the orbital laboratory by the private company Axiom Space.
Crew-6 will see Dragon Endeavor fly as the UAE’s first astronaut on a long-duration mission (Sultan Al Neyadi). The other crewmates are NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoberg and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fadeev.
The Soyuz MS-22 crew will also see their time in space double to a year in orbit as they await the launch of the crewed Soyuz later in 2023 to relieve them of their duties on the ISS. The current forecast for MS-22’s landing is late September.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “why am i tall (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow him on Twitter @howlspace (opens in new tab), Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) either Facebook (opens in new tab),