Space Mission of Progress 82: Delay of the Launch of an Uncrewed Spacecraft after a Space Ship Breakdown on Saturday
Russia’s space agency has delayed the launch of a new spaceship due to a leak in a second vehicle, after a cargo ship broke down on Saturday.
A new plan was to launch an uncrewed capsule on Feb. 19 and bring the astronauts and two cosmonauts back to Earth.
The spacecraft will carry roughly 948 pounds of cargo to the space station, including food and equipment for experiments. Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin will then fly home in the MS-23 in several months. They were originally scheduled to leave by late March but NASA said in January that their missions would now last until September.
“The reason for the loss of coolant in the Progress 82 spacecraft is being investigated,” NASA said in a Saturday statement on its site. “The hatches between the Progress 82 and the station are open, and temperatures and pressures aboard the station are all normal. The crew, which was informed of the cooling loop leak, is in no danger and continuing with normal space station operations.”
New images of the vehicle show that it sustained external damage that caused the leak.
Soyuz MS-22: the Russian Space Agency arrives at the International Space Station after a leak of a spacecraft coolant, and it leads to extremely rare meteor impacts in Earth orbit
The astronauts on the International Space Station are going to be able to get home after the Russian space agency launches a mission on Friday.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin arrived at the International Space Station in September aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz MS-22, which remained docked at the space station.
The craft wouldn’t be viable for a normal return mission to Earth, after an investigation into the leak. It would still be available in the case of an emergency evacuation from the space station.
A state commission issued a permit for the replacement ship’s launch on Monday, according to the Russian state news agency.
Russia’s space fleet is largely designed to be expendable. The history of its series of Soyuz rockets and crew capsules (they both have the same name) dates back to the Soviet era, though they’ve gone through upgrades since. Two Progress cargo vessels launch on Atlas rockets. The cargo ships, crewed ships, and rockets are all single-use spacecraft. Anatoly Zak, creator and publisher of the independent publication RussianSpaceWeb., says that it takes about 1.5 to 2 years to build a Soyuz vehicle, and that they don’t keep a substantial fleet.
The agency has been open about its recent technical issues, and the current one is the leak of a coolant in the Russian capsule docked at the International Space Station. The incident canceled a planned spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts, and the agency later blamed the leak on a micrometeoroid impact.
Zak points out that micrometeoroid impacts in Earth orbit have been exceedingly rare. He thinks the odds of meteors damaging two spacecraft cooling systems—but nothing else on the ISS—in such a short period of time are “very close to zero.”