Russia will launch a first-of-its-kind mission to bring a replacement spacecraft to astronauts who’ve been stranded in orbit without a lifeboat for nearly a month, space officials said Wednesday.
The country plans to send an empty Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station in February to replace the one that was slammed by a tiny meteoroid and began leaking coolant in December, Russia’s Roscosmos agency and NASA said.
“This is the next Soyuz that was scheduled to fly in March. It will just fly a little early,” NASA space station manager Joel Montalbano said at a press conference Wednesday.
The replacement capsule, the Soyuz MS-23, will bring Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio back to Earth after it’s sent up on Feb. 20, he said, according to space.com.
The men have been living with no return ship since the previous spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-22, was struck by a space rock and began spewing white liquid on Dec. 14.
Without the coolant, analysts determined the capsule could overheat to temperatures more than 100 degrees — endangering the crew and potentially causing equipment to glitch.
The scenario is unprecedented and until the replacement spacecraft arrives, there’s a higher chance of an emergency, such as a larger leak that might force the men to evacuate.
But officials on Wednesday played down the threat.
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“I will tell you, there is no immediate need for the crew to come home today, that all the systems are operating,” Montalbano said. “The Soyuz is not good for nominal re-entry … but in case of emergency, with extra risk, we are going to use this Soyuz.”
The astronauts had been scheduled to return to Earth in March but will now remain at the space station for several more months, space officials said.
The damaged capsule will be also sent back to Kazakhstan with cargo in March.
On Dec. 15, a spacewalk by the two Russian cosmonauts was called off after flight controllers noticed a stream of white liquid leaking from the spacecraft.
Officials later said the hole was caused by a one-millimeter-wide meteorite soaring through the cosmos at roughly 15,000 mph.
None of the astronauts were ever in any danger, according to NASA.
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