On December 15 it was learned that the astronauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin (Roscosmos) and Frank Rubio (POT) are stranded on the International Space Station (ISS), inside the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft after a refrigerant leak. As of January 5, 2023, agencies still don’t know how to rescue them.
As a report published on the website of Debate, Prokopyev He is 46 years old and began training as a cosmonaut in February 2011. He achieved the rank of ‘test cosmonaut’ a year later.
Roscosmos then continued to train him until June 2015 when he was assigned to a backup crew. The Sverdlovsk-born is a Russian military aviation pilot and economist with the rank of major.
For his part, Dmitry Petelin, the other Russian from the Soyuz mission, was born on July 10, 1983 in Kostanay, in Kazakhstan. He was part of the 2012 selection group, has two children and is married. He is an aeronautical engineer.
Finally, it’s Frank Rubioof Salvadoran origin, a flight surgeon selected by NASA in 2017. He is a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and its mission and research is based on the creation of human organs in space.
Rubio is on the ISS studying the flammability of materials in microgravity, demonstrating technology for small robotic repair satellites, and capturing images of Earth requested by students. But the most important mission of him is the investigation of the creation of organs outside the planet.
How will they rescue them?
It is not yet clear if the affected spacecraft will be able to carry its associated astronauts back home. The astronauts launched aboard the Soyuz spacecraft in September and they plan to return to Earth in the spring of 2023.
The Soyuz could still function as a comeback vehiclebut if Roscosmos and NASA deem it unusable, Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin would be stranded aboard the ISS until a replacement vehicle is flown to the orbiting laboratory.
The Russian space agency could launch the next Soyuz to the Station without a crew on board as a replacement, but it’s unclear when the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft might be ready for launch and doing so would affect future crew rotations, which were preparing for his trip in March 2023.
NASA and Roscosmos are working together to determine the next course of action following their analysis, the US agency wrote in a blog post.
