ISS News and Discussion

[ecarfan]

Ars Technica Russia: We’re not leaving the Space Station until our own is ready

Reuters is reporting that a senior NASA official has indicated that Russia will continue to operate its portion of the ISS until it has its own station in orbit, something that's currently targeted for 2028. Earlier statements from Russian officials indicated that construction of that station would be started in 2024 but had not provided a completion date. On Wednesday, Roscosmos also posted a video indicating that completion would come in 2028, and the agency would "need to continue operating the ISS" until that date.

At this point who knows what will actually happen. But it seems highly unlikely that Russia will be able to build and launch a functional space station in 5-6 years, if ever. It took them about 20 years to build and launch the Nauka module, which then seriously malfunctioned right after it docked.

 

[ecarfan]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/key-russian-official-confirms-his-countrys-commitment-to-the-space-station/

The Russians can’t seem to make up their minds…

A senior Russian official on Thursday said that his country's space program intends to cooperate with NASA and other partners on the International Space Station for as long as technically possible.
…
Krikalev's measured comments came a little more than a week after the new director general of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, said Russia would not renew its current commitment to the space station after the current agreement ends in 2024.

Borisov has since walked back those comments, but Krikalev was more steadfast in his assessment of the partnership.

 

[JupiterMan]

I have to wonder whether in fact it will be the USA who pull out of the ISS first.

With the advent of Starship, it will be much easier for the USA to get mass to orbit, indeed they could I suspect use a starship itself as a space station should they want to.

With Russian isolationism seeming an entrenched policy at least whilst Putin remains in power, will be interesting to see how this plays out. Maybe USA could call their bluff on this?

 

[808?]

Russia unveils model of proposed space station after leaving ISS

 

[ecarfan]

Russia unveils model of proposed space station after leaving ISS

Well, it’s clear that Russia can build a small scale model of a space station. Let’s see how many years/decades it will take to build the real thing…

 

[scaesare]

Well, it’s clear that Russia can build a small scale model of a space station. Let’s see how many years/decades it will take to build the real thing…

Kinda expected the model to be made out of Legos....

 

[ecarfan]

Interesting analysis of the Russian space program in The Atlantic: The Russian Space Program is Falling Back to Earth

Roscosmos administrators are singing a different tune now that Rogonin is gone:

At a press conference held last week after the cosmonaut Anna Kikina launched on SpaceX, Sergei Krikalev, a former cosmonaut who serves as the executive director of Roscosmos’s human-spaceflight program, told reporters, “We know that is not going to happen very quick.” Russia, he said, could “discuss extending our partnership in ISS.”

If Russia were to jump ship early, it would have no spaceflight program to speak of. “We must bear in mind that if we discontinue manned flights for several years, it will be very difficult to restore what we have achieved afterwards,” Vladimir Solovyov, a former cosmonaut and the flight director for the Russian side of the ISS, said in a Roscosmos interview this summer.

 

[ecarfan]

CCN reports:

The space agency said in a news release that the ISS conducted a five minute, five second burn to avoid a fragment of Russia's Cosmos 1408 satellite, which the country destroyed in a weapons test in November last year.

Officials at NASA have previously warned about the risks of the proliferation of debris in space, caused by a dramatic increase in the number of satellites in orbit and several instances of governments intentionally destroying satellites and creating new plumes of junk.

The space station conducted a "Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver," or PDAM, to give the ISS "an extra measure of distance away from the predicted track of a fragment of Russian Cosmos 1408 debris," the space agency said.

 

[ecarfan]

Last night at around 7:45PM ET on the NASA livestream there were images of a major ”coolant” leak on the docked Soyuz capsule. It caused a planned Russian spacewalk to be cancelled. That seems like a serious problem. Here’s a new report https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/unexplained-leak-docked-soyuz-spacecraft-cancels-russian-iss-spacewalk-2022-12-15/

 

[ecarfan]

That Soyuz is scheduled to depart the ISS next March to take Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio back to Earth.

I can’t find any news reports on what the Russians have said, if anything, about the leak. Even if the leak can be repaired, a large amount of coolant will be lost and how can that be replaced? I doubt that the Russians carry liters of Soyuz coolant fluid, and even if they did how to transfer it to the Soyuz.

Here is a CBS news report about it Russians call off spacewalk to troubleshoot significant Soyuz coolant leak

 

[ecarfan]

Scott Manley has a new video about the Soyuz leak with some useful background information. He clearly considers it a serious issue to have postep a video so quickly.

 

[ecarfan]

Soyuz temperature rising but crew not in danger, says Russian space agency​

Roscosmos said a number of tests had been conducted on the Soyuz on Friday, and the temperature in the capsule increased to 30C (86F).

“This is a slight change in temperature,” the agency said in a statement.

The development was for now “not critical” for the operation of the equipment and the comfort of the crew, Roscosmos said. Sergei Krikalev, a former cosmonaut who heads the crewed space flight programme for Roscosmos, said the leak may have been caused by a tiny meteorite striking Soyuz.

Or a piece of debris from Russia blowing up one of their old satellites in orbit.

To be fair, the US was the first country to pollute LEO with an anti-satellite test explosion, and the Chinese and Indians have also done it.

It’s all bloody stupid behavior.

 

[scaesare]

Soyuz temperature rising but crew not in danger, says Russian space agency​

Or a piece of debris from Russia blowing up one of their old satellites in orbit.

To be fair, the US was the first country to pollute LEO with an anti-satellite test explosion, and the Chinese and Indians have also done it.

It’s all bloody stupid behavior.

Has a definitive cause for the leak been determined?

 

[ecarfan]

Has a definitive cause for the leak been determined?

I have not read any reports with that information. And without doing a spacewalk, it seems impossible to figure out what happened.

Even if a cosmonaut directly examined the site of the leak by doing an EVA and then determined it was caused by an external force I don’t see how one could definitively distinguish between a natural vs. human-made object. If the object is lodged in the Soyuz would probably be impossible to extract during an EVA.

My expectation is that Soyuz is no longer safe for humans. Russia will need to autonomously undock it and send it back to Earth, and launch a replacement Soyuz to bring home Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio.

 

[RME12]

Some were quick to point fingers at the drilling incident a while back. I haven't been keeping up as well as I'd like to, but has there been any similar talk recently?

 

[ecarfan]

NASA postpones spacewalk to support Soyuz investigation

NASA said the postponement would allow flight controllers to use the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm to inspect the exterior of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked there.
Despite the lack of information about the source of the leak, Roscosmos officials have speculated it was caused by a micrometeoroid impact. In a Dec. 16 statement posted by Roscosmos on Telegram, a social media service, Viktor Voropaev, lead engineer at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, said he believed an impact by a micrometeoid linked to the Geminid meteor shower was the “main suspect” for the leak. He offered no other evidence to support that conclusion.
Roscosmos also denied a report in Russian media Dec. 16 that temperatures in the Soyuz spacecraft rose as high as 50 degrees Celsius after the loss of coolant. Temperatures in the spacecraft are instead about 30 degrees Celsius, which Roscosmos described as only a “slight change” and do not pose an immediate threat to the spacecraft or people on the station.

 

[scaesare]

I have not read any reports with that information. And without doing a spacewalk, it seems impossible to figure out what happened.

Even if a cosmonaut directly examined the site of the leak by doing an EVA and then determined it was caused by an external force I don’t see how one could definitively distinguish between a natural vs. human-made object. If the object is lodged in the Soyuz would probably be impossible to extract during an EVA.

My expectation is that Soyuz is no longer safe for humans. Russia will need to autonomously undock it and send it back to Earth, and launch a replacement Soyuz to bring home Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio.

I suspect you may be right about it's ultimate safety.

I mean it's not like a Russian proclamation of "It's safe!" instills much confidence... after all that was the basic message to the inhabitants of Chernobyl until they had no choice but to admit otherwise...

 

[ecarfan]

Reuters: Robotic arm to inspect leaky Soyuz spacecraft, Russia says

“The Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft will be inspected with cameras of the SSRMS, the Space Station Remote Manipulator System,” Roskosmos said in a statement. “The results will be transmitted to earth on Monday.”

Preparations are underway for the launch of the Soyuz MS-23 from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, and Russia’s space agency said that launch could be accelerated if needed.

 

[ecarfan]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/heres-what-we-know-and-what-we-dont-about-the-damaged-soyuz-spacecraft/

Roscomos was never able to stanch the leak of the external cooling loop, so the leak only stopped when there was no coolant left. In the immediate aftermath, Russian flight controllers attempted to use the European robotic arm, attached to the Russian segment of the station, to observe the aft end of the Soyuz where the leak occurred. This 11-meter arm did not provide conclusive data.

As a result, NASA will use the 17.6-meter-long Canadarm2—also known as the space station remote manipulator system—to get a closer look at the Soyuz spacecraft.

NASA plans to do that this weekend, so it may be in progress now. If so, they are not showing it on NASA TV right now.

The external cooling loop of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft is now inoperable. Effectively, this means that a separate cooling loop that keeps the interior of the Soyuz cool—for the comfort of the passengers and the avionics—can no longer easily dump heat into space. Because these flight computers are embedded fairly deeply into the guts of the spacecraft, it's difficult to cool them with the ambient atmosphere of the space station with the hatch open.

If the flight computers become inoperable, to use that Soyuz to return to Earth flight calculations will have to be done manually. That is possible, but not optimal.

Another key question is whether other components on the Soyuz were damaged. If the coolant system was struck by micrometeoroid debris, which appears to be the most likely explanation, this debris could have caused additional damage. This is another reason why a detailed visual inspection of the Soyuz is so important this weekend.

Even if an external inspection can only find one hull penetration, how can Roscosmos be sure that some other component besides the cooling loop was not damaged by the impact?

My completely non-expert assessment is that it would be crazy to put humans in that Soyuz.

 

[ecarfan]

Eric Berger reports the latest news on Soyuz leak

Working with NASA on Sunday to operate the long Canadarm2 manipulator arm, Russian specialists were able to get a clear look at the damaged area on the aft end of the Soyuz spacecraft. The area of the hole is about 0.8 mm across, which, although small, allowed all of the coolant in the external loop to be dumped into space last Wednesday. Importantly, the visual inspection discovered no other notable damage to the Soyuz vehicle from the debris strike... Speaking to Russian media on Monday, the director general of Roscosmos said working groups of specialists would spend about another week assessing the issue. A decision on future actions will be taken on December 27, Yuri Borisov said.

I’m impressed that the camera on the end of the Canadarm2 was able to locate a 0.8mm hole. I would not have thought that was possible. Perhaps the escaping coolant left streaks on the vehicle that were easy to see.