NASA wants to conduct astronaut missions for another year, but it’s unclear when the agency will be able to do so next.
NASA’s Frank Rubio recently became the first American to spend more than 365 days in space after a leak aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, forcing him (and two Russian crew members) to extend their stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). six more months.
After nearly a year of planned successful missions to the ISS with astronauts Mark Vande Hei (355 days), Scott Kelly (340 days), and Christina Koch (328 days), NASA is now considering how to move more astronauts aloft for similar periods of time. days).
The challenge is to prepare a new set of spacecraft ready to support year-round missions, NASA officials said in a livestreamed press conference on Thursday, Jan. 25. meaning US commercial crew vehicles from SpaceX and Boeing. (All of NASA’s long missions to date have been launched by Soyuz vehicles.)
SpaceX has been flying astronauts regularly with Crew Dragon since 2020; Boeing’s Starliner could send its first crewed mission aloft in April after several technical delays. That makes these vehicles relatively new options for the 25-year-old ISS, and senior NASA leaders have said they want to see more service before allowing longer missions.
Relating to: ‘Nothing magical will happen in 2030’: NASA considering possible extension of ISS for astronaut missions
Only a handful of people have spent more than a year in space; the longest examples of these are found on the now retired Soviet-Russian Mir space station (up to 437 continuous days in the case of Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov). NASA is trying to accumulate years in orbit to prepare astronauts (and their support crews) for long-duration space missions to more distant locations, including Artemis program missions to the Moon later in the 2020s and eventually manned missions to Mars.
Time in microgravity or “weightlessness” quickly causes many changes in the human body; These include weakening of bones and muscles, slight straining of the eyes, and altered blood flow. The measures that NASA has developed over decades to mitigate these changes are beginning to take effect; For example, the agency modified its orbiting weight-lifting device in 2009 to provide astronauts with stronger exercise challenges.
One factor in increasing bone density for returning astronauts is that astronauts lift weights using the newer Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) with pistons on the ISS, rather than an older temporary exercise device with resistance bands; That’s according to a 2019 peer-reviewed science paper published in the journal Bone.
This health advance is vital for longer and more ambitious space flights in the future. NASA states that a journey to Mars using current rocket technology would take at least six to nine months one way. Absent further research into creating artificial gravity on a spacecraft, astronauts will likely spend this transit period in microgravity before arriving on Mars, a world with only 38% of Earth’s gravity.
Safely installing Red Planet equipment and navigating an alien world while surviving “weightlessness” is a challenge for astronauts studied in the medical literature. As with all astronautical science, having more human subjects in weightlessness will make the results more representative and help plan future missions.
Relating to: Sending astronauts to Mars by 2040 is an ‘audacious goal’ but NASA is trying anyway
Joe Montalbano, manager of the ISS program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said NASA’s human exploration program is looking for another year of subjects. He was speaking at a news conference Thursday focused mainly on NASA’s next SpaceX astronaut mission, Crew-8, which could fly in late February.
“What we’re talking about [with researchers] So we want both Boeing and SpaceX to fly to the International Space Station regularly. Once that’s done, we’ll decide where to place one of these one-year missions. But there’s no emergency right now [plan] “There is nothing in the near future – it is not possible for a US astronaut to go for a year,” he said.
Montalbano’s comments do not fully rule out the possibility of more one-year Soyuz missions for NASA astronauts, as astronaut exchanges between the United States and Russia on each other’s spacecraft continue until at least 2025. However, neither Montalbano nor Sergei Krikalev, a top official of Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos who spoke at the same press conference, raised this possibility.
Meanwhile, two Roscosmos cosmonauts are currently conducting their own one-year mission to the ISS: Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub arrived on Soyuz MS-24 on September 15, along with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, who made a separate trip home after six flights. -month accommodation. Chub is a spaceflight rookie, but Kononenko already has four missions completed. In fact, with 736 days accrued before MS-24, Kononenko will easily break the all-time record of 878 days in space, currently held by fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka.
The ISS is currently approved to fly until 2030, providing an opportunity for another six years to conduct missions longer than the usual six months each. However, this timeline could potentially be extended down the road. “Nothing magical will happen in 2030,” Steve Stich, manager of JSC’s commercial crew program, said at the press conference of the current 2030 extension, which has been accepted by most partners.
Russia has currently only committed to a 2028 date, although Krikalev said the timing depended on the country’s budget and not an ongoing “dispute” with NASA. The United States and Russia are in a tense geopolitical moment due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has cut off most of Russia’s international space partnerships except for the ISS, which continues for policy reasons.
NASA officials emphasized that station operations were not affected; However, high-level disagreements have occasionally arisen over issues such as the anti-Ukrainian propaganda displayed by cosmonauts on the station.
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Whether it’s possible for major ISP partners to go beyond 2028 (or 2030, as the case may be) is an open question. Continued government funding should be available for startups. Both NASA and Russia are pursuing manned lunar programs in the coming decades, which in itself is quite expensive.
Many of the ISS partners are working with NASA on the Artemis program for manned lunar missions, which imposes extra costs on other countries that depend on the space station. For its part, Russia is working with China on an independent lunar study, which is another sensitive issue; High-level U.S. policy halted most bilateral cooperation with China, including space exploration, after 2011, according to NASA’s website.
Other evaluations are also ongoing on the NASA side. The United States wraps up an election cycle in late 2024 that could affect the course of current space policy. Meanwhile, NASA is funding numerous commercial space station options, but these may not be ready until 2030 due to funding and technology concerns, potentially leaving a gap in low-Earth orbit exploration that NASA has tried to minimize.
Aside from when the ISS will cease operations, there is also the question of how it can continue if Russia leaves earlier than other partners. The Russian and US sides of the orbiting complex are tightly coupled, and the modules cannot be separated from each other, according to NASA materials.