WASHINGTON – A NASA astronaut will fly on a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station in April, as the agency has confirmed a peculiar arrangement for obtaining a seat on the Russian spacecraft.
NASA said on March 9 that Mark Vande Hei will join the crew of the Soyuz MS-18 mission to the station, which begins on April 9. He will be on the mission with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov and will remain at the station for six months.
Vande Hei will undertake his second trip to the space station. He was part of the expedition 53 and 54 crew members and spent 168 days at the station from September 2017 to February 2018. He served as the backup for Kate Rubins, the NASA astronaut who flew to the station last October on Soyuz MS-17 flew, with Novitsky and Dubrov the other backup members of the crew.
The announcement comes a month after NASA released a summary of the acquisition, stating that it intends to acquire a seat on the Soyuz mission, which at the time was a Russian crew of Novitsky, Dubrov and Sergei Korsakov. had. NASA said at the time that it wanted the seat to reduce “the risks associated with any disruption in the presence of the U.S. crew member on the ISS” if there were problems with commercial crew vehicles, and that the seat would be acquired through “similar services in kind. to deliver ‘rather than a direct purchase of Roscosmos.
Roscosmos said in his own statement on March 9 that he had received a “serious request” from NASA for the seat. “NASA only expressed its request at the end of 2020, which means that the Russian side had to change the already confirmed and approved launch program,” he said. “Roscosmos has taken this decision to reaffirm compliance with the Joint Agreements and Joint Use of the International Space Station.”
When NASA published the request in February, NASA did not announce who would take the seat, and NASA officials refused to identify the astronaut in the next briefings, citing restrictions on the provision of information during the ongoing acquisition. However, there are rumors that Vande Hei is the astronaut who would be named if an agreement was reached with the Soyuz seat. On the images released by Roscosmos last month, Novitsky and Dubrov were trained for the mission, wearing flight suits with a Soyuz MS-18 mission spot that also contains Vandei Hei’s name.
In a separate statement on March 9, NASA said it had signed a contract with commercial space company Axiom Space, which would give NASA the seat on the upcoming Soyuz flight. NASA, in turn, will provide Axiom seating for a future commercial crew to the station, likely in 2023.
“Because there is comparable value from the services of both parties, the contract does not contain any exchange of funds,” NASA said in the statement.
NASA has not previously announced its partnership with Axiom Space, but the company, which arranges commercial missions to the ISS and plans to install private modules there, was, according to them, the intermediary between NASA and Roscosmos. An Axiom official declined to comment on how the company acquired the Soyuz seat. An industry source familiar with the deal says in the background that the company bought the seat at Roscosmos in a ‘purely commercial’ arrangement.
NASA’s decision to seek the seat through a third party and do so weeks after launch has raised eyebrows in the space industry. Even NASA’s approach to announcing the agreement was unusual. The agency sent out a standard press release announcing the mandate of Vande Hei and promoting it on the home page of its website. The Axiom contract was not mentioned in that version, but rather in a separate statement posted elsewhere on the NASA website.
NASA’s rush to get a Soyuz seat has also attracted the attention of some members as Congress. Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) And Brian Babin (R-Texas), members of the full House Science Committee and its respective space subcommittee, sent a letter to NASA last month asking for details on NASA’s existing agreements. ‘. and future plans for access to the International Space Station. ”
The agency has long emphasized its desire for ‘mixed crew members’, with NASA astronauts continuing to fly on Soyuz missions and Roscosmos cosmonauts flying on commercial crews. These seats would be exchanged between NASA and Roscosmos.
A NASA astronaut, or one from Canada, Europe or Japan, on every spacecraft going to the station, ‘protects us from all sorts of contingencies’, said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s co-administrator for human reconnaissance and operations, on a briefing of March 1 said about the upcoming SpaceX Crew-2 commercial crew, which will now be launched on April 22.
However, NASA has not yet concluded an agreement with Roscosmos on the exchange of seats. ‘We are working on the capability and continue to have the international agreements in place where we can have our crew members fly on a Soyuz and Rocsomos can have their crew members fly on one of our two commercial crew members, and move on in this new era , ”Lueders said. “It gives us the strongest logistics strategy.”