While being “marooned” on a space station may be a bit dramatic, the three astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) can remain on board until January 2019, said Kenny Todd, a space station manager in Houston, reports the Associated Press.
That is just a month beyond the three crew member’s expected mid-December return. Their Soyuz capsule is good for about 200 days in orbit, period.
Hadfield told EuroNews that the crew would have to wait “quite a while” until they are rescued because a new crew would have to be sent up once the Soyuz rocket problem was fixed. “Others (ships) took over two years” to fix, but Hadfield said it shouldn’t be that long.
Hadfield, an experienced Canadian astronaut described how the two astronauts would have felt as they came crashing down to Earth yesterday: They would have felt “as if you threw a stone into a pond. It floats for a while and then it hits the thickness of the water and then you’re really decelerated. They would have felt something in the order of six or seven times their weight. So they’ll be crushed but that’s how most space flights go.”
Hadfield also praised the two astronauts. “If you listen to the voices of the crew, especially Alexi the commander, he doesn’t sound terrified at all. In fact, he’s calm, trained, matter of fact (in) dealing with the problem.”
An uncrewed International Space Station
Todd says NASA is “dusting off” its plans to operate the space station without a crew. If the Soyuz rocket problem can’t be fixed by January, in time for the astronauts to come home, then flight controllers could operate the lab without anyone on board, reports ABC News.
But, and there is always a “but,” the $100 billion asset would need to be manned before SpaceX or Boeing launches the new crew capsules next year. Someone needs to be on board for the arrival of the commercial demo missions, for safety reasons.
International Space Station commander Alexander Gerst, a European Space Agency astronaut from Germany, tweeted after the Soyuz mishap that he was thankful the two astronauts were safe. He also wrote that the mishap shows “what an amazing vehicle the Soyuz is, to be able to save the crew from such a failure.”
