EDITOR’S NOTE: Updated at 13:20 EDT (1720 GMT) after doc.
Two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut tied up in their Soyuz spacecraft on Friday and moved the capsule to another port of the International Space Station, making clear the arrival of a new crew next month.
Russian Commander Sergey Ryzhikov manually controlled the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft during the resettlement maneuver. Cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins were also on board the spaceship.
All three crew members were launched into the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft in October and will return to Earth on April 17. The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft has custom seat linings for each crew member, and all three were on board for the relocation maneuver Friday, ready to return to Earth in case of problems with the space station.
The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft unlocked the space station’s Russian Rassvet module from the space station on Thursday at 12:38 EDT. Rassvet is located at the lower part, or on the ground side, of the Russian segment of the space station.
Ryzhikov, a 46-year-old former Russian Air Force fighter pilot, flew the Soyuz spacecraft away from the Rassvet module. After Ryzhikov took off at a distance of about 130 feet (40 meters), he executed a flight path around the back of the space station to reach a position above the complex around.
The commander then led the Soyuz spacecraft to a manual docking with the Poisk module at the upper part, or to space, to the Russian segment of the space station. Docking took place at 13:12 EDT (1712 GMT) to complete the 34-minute maneuver.
The unlocking, loose maneuvering and re-docking all happened while the Soyuz and space stations were soaring worldwide at a speed of about 8 kilometers per second.
The crew moved the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft to clear the way for the next Soyuz mission to continue with the Rassvet module after the April 9 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Russian commander Oleg Novitskiy, flight engineer Pyotr Dubrov, and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will launch the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft. Novitskiy and its crew members will replace the Soyuz MS-17 crew members on the space station before returning home on April 17.
Russian officials want the Soyuz MS-18 mission to allow the Rassvet module, and not Poisk, to allow cosmonauts to use Poisk for a spacewalk later this year to prepare for the arrival of the Russian Nauka laboratory module.
The Poisk and Pirs modules of the space station double as coupling gates and air locks for space walks. A Progress supply ship that arrived at the station last month will take away the Poisk module later this year to make way for the Nauka laboratory in the lower coupling position on the Zvezda service module.
The Nauka laboratory module will be launched on a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur in July. It is the most important addition to the Russian part of the space station since 2000, when the Zvezda module itself was launched.
It was the 19th Soyuz gate move in the history of the International Space Station, and the first since August 2019.
Ryzhikov, Kud-Sverchkov and Rubins currently live on the space station with four crew members who were sent aboard SpaceX’s spacecraft Crew Dragon in November.
Dragon Commander Mike Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Soichi Noguchi and Shannon Walker will board their Crew Dragon capsule on April 5 to perform a similar port shift maneuver and release the space station’s front landing port for the arrival of the next crew dragon. on April 23.
Unlike the Soyuz relocation, the Crew Dragon will automatically board and disembark, with Hopkins and its crew members monitoring systems and ready to take control manually if necessary.
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