You may have heard in recent days that there are problems on the International Space Station, but amid the flood of information about other current problems, you may not know exactly what is going on, if it is as serious as some claim or actually exaggerate, and if we therefore, they should have worried about the safety of both the station and, above all, the seven crew members who are currently in it.

The quick answer is that yes, there are reasons to be concerned. The situation is not critical at the moment, but it requires the utmost possible care on the part of the Russian space agency, which should have all possible international cooperation given the circumstances, since three of these passengers are still unaccounted for today. today with the means necessary to carry out an emergency evacuation if circumstances warranted.

But let’s start from the beginning. In the image that opens this news, you can see the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked in one of the ports of the International Space Station. The ship docked with the ISS on September 21 after launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome (Kazakhstan) with three crew members, Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who joined Expedition 68, the current International Space Station.

All went well until the 15th, when both station crew members and ground control noticed a problem, Soyuz MS-22 was releasing some kind of liquid into space. Although there was still no concrete evidence at first, indications pointed to the fact that it was the ship’s coolant, a theory that was eventually confirmed. And why was it leaking coolant? Well, because of the hypothetical but more than likely collusion of a micrometeorite or fragment of space debris with a Russian ship. Just today we learned that the damaged Soyuz does indeed have a 0.8 millimeter wide hole and that Roscosmos is already studying how to act.

In the first place, the planned spacewalks were canceled because the refrigerant in the damaged Soyuz is ammonia-based, which could seep into the spacesuits of the astronauts who would be carrying it inside the International Space Station, causing it to react. to the heat within it that would be toxic to all current inhabitants of the space facility.

The main problem facing the crew of the International Space Station, or rather the three astronauts who arrived there on a Soyuz, is that right now they don’t have an emergency evacuation plan in case an evacuation is necessary. space facility suddenly. When the Soyuz is out of service, they ran out of lifeboats. And when you’re in a structure exposed to all the dangers the ISS faces, that’s a pretty serious problem.

To better understand this, we must remember that there are currently several ships attached to the International Space Station, but only two of them could be used for emergency evacuation. They are SpaceX’s Crew 5 Dragon and the now-damaged Soyuz MS-22, and while the Crew Dragon was designed to carry up to seven people, under current conditions its capacity is limited to four passengers in that regard. This is due to two reasons:

• The internal configuration of the ship is currently four astronauts, and the remaining three obviously could not simply sit on the ground and come back and land.
• The Crew Dragon vehicle suit is custom-made for each astronaut, so the suits of Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio could not be used to return aboard the Crew Dragon.

So, unless it turns out that it’s possible to repair the Soyuz on the International Space Station, which doesn’t seem very likely (although some initial tests of its propellants would be positive), all indications are that Roscosmos would have to plan a launch at least apart from the Soyuz. Roscosmos has set December 27 as the deadline to determine whether Soyuz MS-22 is still operational and can be used normally or whether, on the contrary, the damage is irreversible and it will be necessary to retire it, in which case speed up the launch process of Soyuz MS-23, originally planned for spring.

The problem is that, as we told you recently, the number of incidents in Earth’s orbit has not stopped increasing. A greater amount of space debris and satellites lead to risky situations, which in some cases even forced the crew of the International Space Station to prepare for an emergency evacuation. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary, but just because it wasn’t in the past doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future. And in that case the situation will be critical.

Images: NASA