NASA
Russia’s state-owned space company, Roscosmos, reported on Saturday that the Progress spacecraft attached to the International Space Station lost pressure in its external cooling system.
Roscosmos said in a statement that the seven crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory pose no threat. NASA also said the hatch between the Progress MS-21 vehicle and the space station is open. Notably, the supply ship incident occurred within hours of another Progress ship, MS-22, docking safely.
Roscosmos’ initial statement was vague about the decompression event, but Dmitry Sturgovets, former head of press services for the space agency Roscosmos, later clarified it was a coolant leak. was leaked,” he said via Telegram.
This is the second Russian spacecraft to suffer a cooling system leak within two months on the space station.
already seen
On December 14, 2022, as the two astronauts prepared to perform an EVA outside the space station, a nearby docked Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was controlled from an external cooling loop. It started leaking impossibly. This system carries heat away from the interior of the spacecraft.
The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was scheduled to return astronauts Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Peterin, and NASA’s Frank Rubio, to Earth in March. Russian engineers eventually declared that a micrometeorite had hit the spacecraft’s external cooling loop and decided it was unsafe to return.
In January, Roscosmos and NASA officials said a replacement Soyuz spacecraft would launch to the station in February and dock autonomously. A crew member who was flying on a damaged Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, including Rubio, will return home in late 2023 on this Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft instead. Crew, probably March.
It is not clear how the leaked Progress and Soyuz spacecraft are directly related. However, according to a NASA source, there was some preliminary data received from the Progress vehicle that indicated similar cooling system problems. External cameras showed flakes moving away from the progress vehicle (frozen coolant), similar to what was observed on the Soyuz MS-22.
Growing list of failures
Roscosmos said on Saturday that the Progress accident “will not affect future station programs.” This is at least true for Progress MS-21. The spacecraft was already packed with trash and other material that had to be removed from the station and was due to leave next week after burning up in Earth’s atmosphere during re-entry.
However, it seems premature to draw such conclusions for future missions. The key question is what caused the decompression event observed on Saturday. A second micrometeorite seems unlikely to have hit her as her second Russian spacecraft within two months. This raises questions about whether the Soyuz MS-22 failure was really a micrometeorite problem.
Hours after Progress’s decompression on Saturday, there are more questions than answers, but nothing to reassure NASA as it continues to operate the space station in partnership with Russia. This latest Soyuz and Progress failure could be the result of a Nauka module thruster misfire in 2021, a Soyuz booster failure in 2018 that forced Alexei Obchinin and Nick Haig to make an emergency return to Earth, or another leak. Just two in a long string of recent issues, including: Soyuz vehicle.
These are the kinds of problems you would expect from a Russian space industry that relies on aging infrastructure, aging technology and quality control issues due to inadequate budgets.
