by NASA wants to run more astronaut missions year-round, but it’s unclear when the agency will be able to do that.
NASA’s Frank Rubio recently became the first American to spend more than 365 straight days in space, after his Russian Soyuz spacecraft leaked and forced him (and his two colleagues Russians) to extend their stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). an additional six months.
Now NASA is considering how to bring up more agency astronauts for similar periods, after successful planned one-year missions aboard the ISS with astronauts Mark Vande Hei (355 days), Scott Kelly (340 days) and Christina Koch (328). days).
The challenge is to prepare a new set of spacecraft to support year-round missions — meaning commercial US crew vehicles from SpaceX and Boeing, NASA officials said at a live-streamed press conference Thursday (Jan. 25). (All of NASA’s long-duration missions to date have been launched aboard Soyuz vehicles.)
SpaceX has been flying astronauts regularly since 2020 on its Crew Dragon, and Boeing’s Starliner may launch its first crewed mission in April after various technical delays. That situation makes these vehicles relatively new options for the 25-year-old ISS, and senior NASA leadership said they would like to see more service before longer missions are authorized.
Related: ‘There’s nothing magical that happens in 2030’: NASA looks at possible ISS extension for astronaut missions
Only a handful of people have spent more than a year in space, with the longest examples (up to 437 continuous days in the case of Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov) on the now-retired Soviet-Russian Mir space station. NASA has been working to accumulate decades in orbit to prepare astronauts (and their support crews) for long-duration space missions to more distant places, including the Artemis program missions to the moon later in the 2020s and Mars missions later human.
Time in microgravity or “weightlessness” induces many rapid changes in the human body, including the weakening of bones and muscles, as well as slightly stretched eyes and a shift in blood flow. NASA has spent many years developing measures to mitigate these changes; for example, the agency modified its in-orbit weight-lifting device in 2009 to give astronauts more vigorous exercise challenges.
Weight lifting by astronauts using the Advanced Resistance Exercise Device (ARED) on the ISS with pistons, instead of an older interval exercise device with resistance bands, is one factor in improving bone density for returning astronauts; that’s according to a 2019 peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the journal Bone.
These health advances are essential for longer and more ambitious space flights in the future. NASA says a trip to Mars, using current rocket technology, would take at least six to nine months one way. In the absence of further research into creating artificial gravity on board a spacecraft, it is likely that astronauts would spend that transit time in microgravity before reaching Mars, a world with only 38% of Earth’s gravity.
Safely anchoring the Red Planet equipment and navigating an alien world while recovering from “weightlessness” is a problem for astronauts studied in the medical literature. As with all astronaut science, more human subjects and weightlessness would make the results more representative and help plan future missions.
Related: Sending astronauts to Mars by 2040 is a ‘reasonable goal’ but NASA is trying anyway
NASA’s human research program is looking for more material every year, said Joe Montalbano, ISS program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. He was speaking Thursday during a press conference there that focused primarily on Crew-8, the next SpaceX astronaut mission for NASA that could fly in late February.
“What were we talking about [with researchers] that is, we want Boeing and SpaceX to fly regularly to the International Space Station. Once that’s done, we’ll figure out where to put one of this year’s missions. But now, there is no immediate [plan] – anything in the near future – for a US astronaut to go for a year,” he said.
Montalbano’s comments didn’t exactly rule out more year-long Soyuz missions for NASA astronauts, as astronaut exchanges between the United States and Russia continue on each other’s spacecraft until at least 2025. But neither Montalbano nor Sergei Krikalev, a senior officer with the Russians. The federal space agency Roscosmos, speaking at the same press conference, raised that possibility.
Meanwhile, two Roscosmos cosmonauts are currently carrying out their own one-year mission on the ISS: Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub arrived on September 15 aboard Soyuz MS-24 together with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, who is traveling on home after six. -month wait. Chub is a spaceflight rookie, but Kononenko has already completed four missions. In fact, with 736 days accrued before MS-24, Kononenko will easily break the total time record of 878 days in space, currently held by fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka.
The ISS is currently approved to fly until 2030, giving it another six years to run longer missions than the usual six months each. But that timeline could be extended down the road. “There is nothing magical that happens in 2030,” said Steve Stich, manager of the commercial crew program at JSC, at a press conference on the current 2030 extension agreed by most partners.
Russia has only committed to 2028 so far, although Krikalev said the timing is tied to the country’s budget and not to an ongoing “disagreement” with NASA. The United States and Russia are in geopolitical tension over Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which has severed most of Russia’s international space partnerships aside from the ISS, which continues for policy reasons.
NASA officials have emphasized that there will still be no impact on station operations; that said, high-level disputes have arisen from time to time over topics such as anti-Ukrainian propaganda displayed by cosmonauts on the station.
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Whether an extension beyond 2028 (or 2030, as the case may be) is feasible for the main ISS partners is an open question. Continuous government funding must be available, for starters. Both NASA and Russia are hoping for manned moon programs in the coming years, which are quite expensive in themselves.
Most of the ISS partners are working with NASA on the Artemis program for human lunar missions, which brings additional costs to other countries aligned with space stations. For its part, Russia is working with China on an independent moon effort, which is another sensitive matter; High-level US policy halted most Chinese bilateral cooperation after 2011, including space exploration, according to NASA’s website.
There are still other issues going on from NASA’s point of view. The US is finishing up an election cycle in late 2024 that could affect the direction of current space policy. Meanwhile, NASA is funding several commercial space station options, but these may not be ready by 2030 due to funding and technology issues, which could leave a gap in low Earth orbit research that NASA wants to minimize.
Apart from when the ISS will cease operations, the question is how it can continue if Russia leaves earlier than other partners. The Russian and US sides of the orbital complex are tightly entwined and the modules will not be able to separate from each other, according to NASA materials.
