Nasa is exploring whether SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft can potentially offer an alternative ride home for some crew members of the International Space Station after a Russian capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbital lab.
Nasa and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, are investigating the cause of a punctured coolant line on an external radiator of Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is supposed to return its crew of two cosmonauts and one US astronaut to Earth early next year.
In December, a coolant leak on the Russian Soyuz craft docked to the ISS marked a ‘serious situation’. The leak emptied a vital fluid used to regulate cabin temperatures and derailed Russia’s space station routines.
While engineers in Moscow think about whether to launch another Soyuz to retrieve the three-man team, Nasa is weighing SpaceX as an alternative.
‘We have asked SpaceX a few questions on their capability to return additional crew members on Dragon if necessary, but that is not our prime focus at this time,’ Nasa spokeswoman Sandra Jones said in a statement to Reuters.
The company’s potential involvement in a mission led by Russia underscores the degree of precaution Nasa is taking to ensure its astronauts can safely return to Earth, should one of the other contingency plans arranged by Russia fall through.
The leaky Soyuz capsule ferried US astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin to the space station in September for a six-month mission. They were scheduled to return to Earth in March 2023.
The station’s four other crew members – two more from Nasa, a third Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut – arrived in October via a Nasa-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which also remains parked at the ISS.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, a gumdrop-shaped pod with four astronaut seats, has become the centrepiece of Nasa’s human spaceflight efforts in low-Earth orbit. Besides Russia’s Soyuz program, it is the only entity capable of ferrying humans to the space station and back.
A meteoroid-caused puncture, a strike from a piece of space debris or a hardware failure on the Soyuz capsule itself are three possible causes of the leak that Nasa and Roscosmos are investigating.
They are also focusing on determining the health of MS-22 which is also meant to serve as the three-man crew’s lifeboat in case an emergency on the station requires evacuation.
A recent meteor shower initially seemed to raise the odds of a micrometeoroid strike as the culprit, but the leak was facing the wrong way for that to be the case, Nasa’s ISS program manager Joel Montalbano told reporters last week, though a space rock could have come from another direction.
And if a piece of space debris is to blame, it could fuel concerns about an increasingly messy orbital environment and raise questions about whether such vital equipment as the spacecraft’s coolant line should have been protected by debris shielding, as other parts of the MS-22 spacecraft are.
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