by SpaceX’s astronaut taxi may be getting a shield upgrade.
NASA is considering asking SpaceX to strengthen the existing shielding on the company’s Crew Dragon capsule after something blew a small hole in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in December 2022, agency officials said at a news conference Wednesday (Jan. 25). ).
The impact, likely from a micrometeoroid, occurred while the Soyuz was docked with 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 transport astronauts home except in an emergency.
That is why the Russian space agency Roscosmos has decided to launch an empty Soyuz on February 20 to bring the three MS-22 crew members back to Earth. That trip is expected to take place in September, about six months after the trio’s originally planned homecoming date.
Related: International Space Station: live updates
Talks with SpaceX are in the early stages; the shield-boost idea was just brought up on Tuesday (Jan. 24) at a regularly scheduled commercial crew meeting, said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
“We started talking about a little bit — can we do something now?” he said during Wednesday’s press conference, which provided an update on ISS operations and the next SpaceX mission to the station, Crew-6, scheduled to launch Feb. 26.
SpaceX’s Sarah Walker said the company is aligned with NASA’s goals. Walker, who is director of Dragon mission management, also stressed that all analysis so far shows that the Crew Dragon now docked at the ISS, called Endurance, is doing just fine.
“The Dragon systems are healthy and operating nominally,” Walker said at Endurance’s Wednesday press conference, which launched to the orbiting lab on SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission for NASA last October.
Roscosmos officials say the damaged Soyuz MS-22 could house two of its three crew members if an emergency necessitated evacuation from the ISS. However, the ride back to Earth would be hot without coolant. The two who would make that trip on MS-22 are cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin. The third crew member, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, would join the four Crew-5 astronauts on Endurance in a “lifeboat” scenario.
NASA considered numerous safety questions before approving Rubio’s seat liner for a switch from Soyuz MS-22 to Endurance, agency officials said Wednesday, including ensuring there was adequate oxygen in the SpaceX craft, reducing carbon dioxide to a could be kept to a minimum and that the landing would be safe .
SpaceX originally designed the Crew Dragon vehicle to carry as many as seven people. But the Endurance was equipped with only four seats, and securing Rubio as an unexpected fifth crew member required clever repurposing of supplies in orbit.
“We looked at taking some cargo straps off the CRS-26 vehicle,” Stich said, referring to a SpaceX Dragon cargo pod now docked to the ISS. “We were able to put the straps over Frank and then the seat cover, if needed, and then secure him to the floor of the Dragon,” he added.
The empty Soyuz vehicle, known as MS-23, will launch on a trajectory that NASA employee Kathy Lueders called “one of the busiest strides in the station’s history” during Wednesday’s press conference.
Among the many planned crewed launches to the ISS in the first half of 2022 are Crew Flight Test, the first astronaut mission for Boeing’s Starliner capsule; SpaceX Crew-6; and Ax-2, the second manned mission to the orbiting lab by private company Axiom Space.
Crew-6 will see the Dragon Endeavor fly the United Arab Emirates’ first astronaut on a long-duration mission (Sultan Al Neyadi). The other crew members are NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
The Soyuz MS-22 crew will also see their time in space double to a year in orbit as they await the launch of a crewed Soyuz later in 2023 to ease their duties on the ISS. The current forecast for landing MS-22 is late September.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in new tab)(ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a space medicine book. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
