Russian Space Agency May Send Rescue Craft To Space Station

The Russian space agency is deciding whether it needs to send a rescue spacecraft to the International Space Station to bring home two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut after the Soyuz capsule that brought them there suffered a massive coolant leak. The Washington Post reports: Working with their counterparts at NASA, officials at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, are trying to determine if the vehicle is sound enough to bring the crew home, Sergei Krikalev, the executive director of Roscosmos's human spaceflight programs, said during a briefing Thursday. If not, the Russian agency would send up another Soyuz spacecraft that was to be used for another crewed mission to retrieve the crew. That spacecraft could be ready to fly up without any people on board sometime in February, a few weeks before the crew is set to return in March, officials said. The crew that would fly home on the rescue craft would include NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and a pair of cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, who arrived at the station in September. Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and SpaceShuttle program manger, said he could recall of no other time when NASA or Roscosmos had been forced to consider sending up another spacecraft as a lifeboat to bring back a crew.

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