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This will be Matveyev and Korsakov’s first spaceflight, and the trio will spend the next six and a half months aboard the space station.
The astronauts manually steered the Soyuz through the docking station and successfully docked at 3:12 p.m. ET. The hatch opened at 5:48 p.m. ET and they were welcomed aboard the International Space Station by two Russian cosmonauts, four NASA astronauts and a European Space Agency cosmonaut. Crew members laughed and hugged after floating through the hatch.
This brings the station’s crew to 10.
Russian Soyuz launches usually involve two cosmonauts and at least one cosmonaut from NASA or another international partner due to a crew swap agreement between Roscosmos and other agencies.
It’s not the first time an all-Russian mission has taken place – a Russian crew visited the station in October to shoot the first movie in space.
Although the launch of this cosmonaut takes place at a time of rising geopolitical tensions, the absence of participation from other nations was coincidental and based on an earlier agreement between NASA and Roscosmos to postpone the crew exchange for future missions in 2022.
“We are still planning to work on the crew swap,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s International Space Station program manager, told a news conference on Monday. “So we still have a training schedule for Rocosmos to come to Houston and for Hawthorne and our team to go to Star City and train at Soyuz.
“In terms of interacting with the White House, they understand that we are continuing those processes. We get questions from time to time and we answer them, but today we continue to work on those agreements.
Montalbano did not respond to a question about extending the ISS’s partnership with Russia until 2030.
When asked if the current tensions on Earth have translated to the crew aboard the space station, Montalbano replied, “When you’re in space, there are no limits. You don’t see state lines or state borders.”
“Teams continue to work together. Are they aware of what is happening on Earth? Sure. Astronauts and cosmonauts are some of the most professional groups you will ever see. They continue to work very well and there is really no tension with the team. They are trained for this and they do this work.
back on earth
On March 30, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hee will return to Earth with Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov.
Vande Hei – who flew to the International Space Station in April 2021 – surpassed NASA astronaut Scott Kelly’s record of 340 days in space on March 15, and when he lands in Kazakhstan he will will have set a new record for the time a person spends. Spent in space: 355 days.
The space agency attempted on Monday to reaffirm that it continues to work closely with Russian space agency Rokosmos on the International Space Station, despite escalating geopolitical tensions.
According to Montalbano, joint operations between NASA and Roscosmos at Russia’s facilities in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, are “still going well.” “I can tell you for sure, Mark [Vande Hei] She will return home “aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft,” Montalbano said Monday. We are in contact with our Russian colleagues, there is no fog about this. †
NASA officials have not said there will be any significant changes to plans for Vande Hee’s return to the United States after landing. He will return home via Gulfstream, as other American astronauts have done before him.
For nearly a decade, Russian Soyuz vehicles were the sole means of transporting astronauts to and from the space station. But that reliance ended after SpaceX launched its Crew Dragon capsule in 2020 and the United States restored manned spaceflight capabilities.
Asked by CNN Montalbano’s Kristen Fisher if NASA had any contingency plans in case US-Russian relations deteriorate, he replied, “The International Space Station, I’ll tell you, is the main model for international cooperation. . We have already spoken (about) the interdependence that we have between the American side and the Russian side. This is why we can operate and how we work… At the moment there is no indication from our Russian partners that they want to do things differently. We therefore plan to continue our activities as we currently do.
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