Technology
U.S. astronauts set to return home from International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz
According to the latest report, the Russian “Soyuz MS-21” spacecraft carrying 3 Russian astronauts completed the docking with the International Space Station on the same day, and the 3 astronauts went smoothly arrive at the International Space Station. Despite tensions, Russia and the United States will continue to share construction results on track.
The three of them will spend 195 days on the International Space Station and plan to return to Earth on September 30 this year. It is reported that this is Russia’s first manned space mission in 2022. In addition, American astronaut Mark Vander Hei and other two people are also preparing to return to Earth on March 30 with the help of the Soyuz.
The day before that, the European Space Agency (ESA) had just announced the suspension of its Mars mission with Russia, and at the International Space Station, the arrival of three Russian astronauts was still warmly received by four Americans and a German astronaut welcome.
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After the Soyuz successfully lifted off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, it took about 3 hours and 10 minutes to fly, and when it flew about 250 miles (400 kilometers), it successfully docked with the space station; about two more hours later, the hatch opened, and three smiling Soyuz astronauts in yellow flight suits floated into the International Space Station, while the seven-station crew members who were waiting for them on the other side of the corridor warmly shook hands.
According to reports, the Soyuz team has just started a 6-1/2-month scientific research mission led by commander Oleg Artemyev, accompanied by two rookies Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov will replace the original scheduled to return to Earth on March 30th. Three ISS crew members – astronauts Peter Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and American astronaut Mark van der Hey.
When Van der Hey and his two fellow astronauts return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule, he will be in space for a streak of 355 days, a NASA record. In a few months, the next rotation on the ISS will be three American astronauts -Tom Mashburn, Raja Charlie, and Kayla Barron -and ESA’s German astronaut Marty Yas Maurer.
It is worth mentioning that the above-mentioned four crew members are scheduled to travel to the International Space Station in November on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they will stay in space for six months.
The International Space Station project was launched in 1998 in an effort to improve U.S.-Russian relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Cold War hostility sparked the initial U.S.-Soviet space race. It has been run since November 2000 by several cooperative agencies led by the United States and Russia, including Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries.
But the relationship between the United States and Russia in space cooperation is currently facing a test. The United States will impose high-tech export restrictions as part of the economic sanctions the United States imposed on Russia last month. This is to “weak” Russia’s space industry, including the space program.
Dmitry Rogozin, the director-general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, slammed the U.S. sanctions as potentially “destroying” the ISS partnership and deorbiting the space station. A week later, Rogozin announced that Russia would stop supplying two NASA suppliers with Russian-made rocket engines, and suggested that American astronauts could use a “broom” to fly to space.
Around the same time, Russia said it stopped joint research with Germany on the International Space Station and forced Britain to cancel a satellite launch from Baikonur. He also said last month that Russia had suspended launch cooperation with Europe from the European Space Center in French Guiana.
On Thursday, the European Space Agency also announced that it would no longer cooperate with Russia on the ExoMars mission. The ExoMars mission requires Russia to launch a European-made rover to Mars later this year. Rogozin responded that Russia would start its own Mars mission.
Rogozin’s recent actions have prompted some in the U.S. space industry to reconsider the NASA-Roscosmos partnership. NASA officials said that although the US and Russian ISS crews knew what was happening on Earth, they still worked together, and the tension did not affect the close cooperation on the space station.