Russian space company Roscosmos announced on Saturday that a Progress supply ship attached to the International Space Station had lost pressure in its external cooling system.
In its statement, Roscosmos said there was no threat to the seven crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA also said the hatch between the Progress MS-21 vehicle and the space station was open. Notably, the incident with the supply vessel occurred hours following another Progress vessel, MS-22, was safely docked.
Although Roscosmos’ initial statement was vague regarding the depressurization event, Dmitry Strugovets, a former head of the Roscosmos space agency’s press service, later clarified that it was a fluid leak from cooling. “All the coolant leaked,” he said via Telegram.
It is the second Russian spacecraft to suffer a cooling system leak in less than two months on the space station.
Already seen
On December 14, 2022, as two cosmonauts prepared to conduct a spacewalk outside the space station, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked nearby began to leak uncontrollably from its cooling loop. external. This system removes heat from the interior of the spacecraft.
This Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was supposed to bring cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, as well as NASA’s Frank Rubio, back to Earth in March. Russian engineers eventually said a micrometeorite had hit the spacecraft’s outer cooling loop and deemed it unsafe to return home.
In January, Roscosmos and NASA officials said a replacement Soyuz spacecraft would launch and autonomously dock with the station in February. The crew that would have flown in the damaged Soyuz MS-22 vehicle, including Rubio, will instead return home in this Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft later in 2023. The leaked Soyuz MS-22 vehicle will perform an autonomous return to Earth , unmanned, probably in March.
It’s unclear how directly leaky Progress and Soyuz spacecraft are related. According to a NASA source, however, some preliminary data received from the Progress vehicle indicated a similar cooling system issue. External cameras showed flakes moving away from the Progress vehicle – frozen coolant – similar to that seen with Soyuz MS-22.
Growing Chess List
Roscosmos said on Saturday that the Progress incident “will have no impact on the station’s future schedule.” This is probably true for Progress MS-21, at least. The spacecraft has already been filled with trash and other materials to be removed from the station, and was due to leave next week, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere during re-entry.
However, it seems too early to draw such a conclusion for future missions. A critical question is what caused the depressurization event observed on Saturday. It seems unlikely that a second micrometeorite has struck as the second Russian spacecraft in less than two months. This raises doubts as to whether the Soyuz MS-22 failure was indeed a micrometeorite problem – Russia has never released images of the impact site – and perhaps a manufacturing defect instead.
Hours following Progress’s depressurization on Saturday, there are more questions than answers, but none of this will comfort NASA as it partners with Russia to continue operating the space station. These latest Soyuz and Progress failures are just two in a long string of recent problems, including failed Nauka module thrusters in 2021, a Soyuz booster failure in 2018 that forced Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague to make a emergency return to Earth, or another leaking Soyuz vehicle.
These are the kinds of problems one would expect from a space industry in Russia that depends on aging infrastructure, aging technology and quality control issues due to inadequate budgets.