A damaged Soyuz capsule has forced NASA and its Russian counterpart to consider solutions in case the space station needs to be evacuated in an emergency.
Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft suffered damage at the International Space Station (ISS) in December when a leak caused it to lose a large amount of coolant.
Following an investigation, NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, decided to send a replacement Soyuz spacecraft on February 20.
But the unusual incident left the ISS operators with a serious concern: How would it evacuate the three Soyuz astronauts — Roscosmos’s Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, and NASA’s Francisco Rubio — in the event of an emergency?
It’s now been decided that if there’s a call to evacuate the ISS before the replacement Soyuz arrives, Rubio will enter SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which brought the four Crew-5 astronauts to the ISS in October, while Prokopyev and Petelin will enter the damaged Soyuz spacecraft.
