The joint crew flight of one astronaut and two cosmonauts will probably take place according to the schedule from the Baikonur space center in September.
The conflicts on Earth have not extended to the partnership between the US and Russia in space before Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
The most famous object of the cooperation is the International Space Station (ISS), which was commissioned in 1998.
It is operated by the US space administration NASA, the Russian Roscosmos and the European Space Agency ESA. Japan and Canada are also actively involved.
There are 11 European countries in ESA’s manned space flight program, Finland is not included.
The changing crew of the ISS consists of astronauts, cosmonauts and individual space pilots from the countries involved in the project.
Russia threatens termination
– Orbital lifting, i.e. correcting the orbit of the ISS from time to time, has been in Russia’s hands until now, but currently other participants in the space program are looking for alternatives, describes the situation, the president of the Finnish Space Research Society Matti Peltomäki.
In July, the president Vladimir Putin was replaced at the head of Roscosmos by the then Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov.
After the change of space boss, Russia announced that it will withdraw from the International Space Station after 2024 and at the same time start building its own space station.
The possible withdrawal of Russia means a serious threat to the entire operation of the ISS, even though ESA and Elon Musk’s The SpaceX company and the Northrop Grumman company have announced that they will give all their support to solving the technical challenges of keeping the ISS in orbit.
The US wants to continue until 2030
However, NASA has not received an official notification from Russia about ending cooperation. Based on its own sources, the US Space Administration estimates that Russia will remain involved in the cooperation until at least 2028.
– It seems that the next joint crew flight is taking place in accordance with the old plans in September. At stake are two Soyuz flights in the next few years, the planning of which should start now in the fall. Within the framework of the contract procedure, the launch contract can be terminated two years in advance, so there may still be big announcements in the September-October axis, Peltomäki estimates.
The war in Ukraine has also caused disruption to other international space projects.
Next crew flight in September
The Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan has been the center of Russian spaceflight for 65 years. From there too Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth in 1961.
When the United States ended space shuttle flights in 2011, crew changes to the Earth-orbiting International Space Station (ISS) were carried out for almost a decade only by Soyuz rockets from Baikonur.
Even before the war started by Russia in Ukraine, the Soyuz MS-22 launch from Baikonur on September 21 was marked for the ISS crew change.
Now, just a month before the planned launch, it still seems that there are astronauts sitting in the same crew capsule Francisco Rubio and cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin.
You can discuss the topic until 23:00 on 19 August 2022.