NEW YORK — Two NASA astronauts on the international space station are now facing longer-than-planned missions in the wake of a Russian Soyuz-U rocket failure that has temporarily grounded the vehicle.
Astronauts Ron Garan and Mike Fossum told reporters Sept. 6 they hope the problem with Russia’s Soyuz rockets will be resolved soon. The astronauts are part of the station’s international six-man crew.
“The investigation is still ongoing for what happened with the Soyuz booster,” Fossum said. “The whole path from here to launching humans — there’s a number of steps along the way: finding the problem, fixing the problem, having a few unmanned test flights. There’s a lot of things that have to stack up to make that happen.”
The failed Soyuz-U rocket, which was carrying the unmanned Progress 44 cargo craft to deliver supplies to the station, crashed shortly after liftoff Aug. 24. The booster is similar to the Soyuz-FG rockets that carry Soyuz-TMA crew capsules to space, so Russian officials must resolve that failure before any more Soyuz rockets launch with people onboard. Now that NASA’s space shuttles are retired, the Soyuz system is the only way to launch crews to the station.
The current station crew is not stranded, though; those spacefliers can return to Earth aboard the Soyuz-TMA spacecraft they rode up on, which are waiting docked at the outpost. However, without any sure way to launch their replacements, NASA and the Russian space agency have decided to delay those return flights.
Soyuz schedule shuffle
Garan was originally scheduled to land Sept. 8, along with Russian crew members Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev. Those three will now return to Earth Sept. 15. Fossum, cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa are currently scheduled to come home in mid-November.
Hopefully, the Soyuz problem will be fixed and the fleet ready to fly by then. If not, though, there is a chance the international space station would be left empty, with no crew onboard, for the first time in more than 10 years.
“It’s possible we will have a station without people on it for a hopefully short period of time,” Fossum said. “We’ll be getting into the details of what it takes to turn out the lights in the weeks ahead. It’s too early for us to get too worried about that right now, frankly.”
The extra time before coming home will allow the spacefliers to accomplish more science research as well as give ground investigators more time to fix the Soyuz. The astronauts said they have plenty of supplies for the extended stay, even without the shipment that was to be launched aboard the failed rocket.
“From a supply point of view we really are in good shape,” Garan said. “We’ve got a lot of water onboard, a lot of food onboard, a lot of consumables onboard. We haven’t gotten to the point yet where we really need to start conserving.”
Humanity’s outpost in space
The football-field-size international space station is slated to operate until at least 2020. With the shuttle program finished and NASA still planning its next missions to deep space, the station is now the primary focus of America’s human spaceflight program.
Having to evacuate the station, even for a short time, would be unfortunate, the astronauts said, but would not threaten the $100 billion laboratory’s legacy or value.
“The money that has been spent on the international space station — I think history will prove this — is the best investment in our future that we have ever made,” Garan said. “The money that’s been invested will be returned many times over in new material, new medicines, just improved life on Earth. I think that if we get to the point where we have to unman the space station, I hope we’ve already demonstrated at that point how valuable this asset is. I would hope there would be an uproar for keeping it manned.”
