Moscow. Russia reported this Saturday that it plans to send a rescue ship on February 24 to bring three crew members from the International Space Station (ISS) to Earth, after postponing the launch due to a leak in another ship moored to the ISS.
“The launch is scheduled for February 24,” he told the afp a source from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, although he specified that the final decision was up to the State Commission, which will meet “soon”.
Roscosmos said earlier this Saturday in a statement that “the council of the main (aerospace) designers recommended to the State Commission to schedule the launch of the Soyuz MS-23 space vehicle (…) from Baikonur on February 24 at 03:34 Moscow time” (00:24 GMT).
On Monday, the Russian space agency announced that it would delay the launch of the Soyuz MS-23 until early March, after a new leak was discovered aboard another spacecraft anchored on the ISS.
This new incident takes place two months after a leak was detected in another Russian ship attached to the ISS, which was supposed to bring two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut, Frank Rubio, to Earth.
Faced with the impossibility of using the damaged capsule, Roscosmos had announced in mid-January that it wanted to use another spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-23, to go to the ISS to recover the crew.
The International Space Station is one of the few sectors in which Russia and the United States still cooperate, after the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine on February 24 and the Western sanctions that followed.
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