It is possible that, during the last few days, you have heard that there are problems on the International Space Station, but among the barrage of information on other current issues, you may not know what exactly is happening, if it is as serious as some claim or in reality they are exaggerating and if we should, therefore, worry about the safety of both the station and, above all, the seven crew members who are currently in it.
The quick answer is that yes, there are reasons to worry. The situation at the moment is not critical, but it requires the greatest possible diligence on the part of the Russian space agency which, given the circumstances, should have all possible international collaboration, since three of these occupants do not count, to date. of today, with the necessary means to carry out an emergency evacuation if the circumstances that required it were given.
But, let us start at the beginning. In the image that opens this news item you can see the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to one of the ports of the International Space Station. The ship docked with the ISS on September 21, after taking off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome (Kazakhstan) with three crew members, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitriy Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who joined the Expedition 68, the current one of the International Space Station.
Everything was going well until the 15th, when both the crew members of the station and the ground control centers detected a problem, the Soyuz MS-22 was ejecting some kind of fluid into space. Although at first there was still no exact evidence, the indications pointed to the fact that it was the ship’s coolant, a theory that was finally confirmed. And why was it expelling coolant? Well, due to a hypothetical but more than likely collusion of a micro meteorite or a fragment of space debris with the Russian ship. Just today we learned that, indeed, the damaged Soyuz has a hole 0.8 millimeters wide, and that Roscosmos is already studying how to act.
In the first instance, the planned spacewalks were canceled, because the coolant in the damaged Soyuz is based on ammonia, which could permeate the space suits of cosmonauts who, in turn, would carry it inside the International Space Station. , causing it to react to the heat inside it, which would be toxic to all current inhabitants of the space facility.
Now, the main problem facing the crew of the International Space Station or, to be more exact, the three astronauts who arrived there on the Soyuz, is that right now they do not have an emergency evacuation plan, in case it is necessary to evacuate the space facility suddenly. With the Soyuz out of commission, they have run out of lifeboat. And that, when you are in a structure exposed to all the dangers that the ISS faces, is a pretty serious problem.
To understand it better, we must bear in mind that there are currently several ships attached to the International Space Station, but only two of them could be used for emergency evacuation. They are SpaceX’s Crew 5 Dragon and the now damaged Soyuz MS-22, and although by design the Crew Dragon could carry up to seven people, under current conditions its capacity in this regard is limited to four occupants. This is due to two reasons:
- The interior configuration of the ship is currently four astronauts, and obviously the remaining three could not simply sit on the ground for a reentry and landing.
- The Crew Dragon vehicular suit is custom-made for each astronaut, so Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio’s suits could not be used for reentry aboard Crew Dragon.
So, unless it is determined that it is possible to repair the Soyuz on the International Space Station, something that does not seem very likely (although some initial tests of its propellants would have been positive), everything indicates that Roscosmos would have to schedule the launch of at least except a Soyuz. Roscosmos has set December 27 as the deadline to determine if the Soyuz MS-22 is still operational and can be used normally or if, on the contrary, the damage is irreversible and it will be necessary to discard it and, in such a case, speed up the process. launch of the Soyuz MS-23, originally scheduled for spring.
The problem is that, as we have been telling you recently, the number of incidents in Earth orbit has not stopped increasing. The greater amount of both space debris and satellites is giving rise to risk situations that, in some cases, have even forced the crew of the International Space Station to prepare for an emergency evacuation. Fortunately, it has not been necessary, but the fact that it has not been so in the past does not imply that it will not be necessary in the future. And in such a case, the situation will be critical.
Images: NASA
