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The mystery of why a small hole appeared in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station last year is now even stranger than it already was. The hole, which was detected by the crew and repaired in space, triggered investigations by Russia, Roscosmos and NASA, both agencies wanting to get to the bottom of things.
After months of silence, the boss of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, says that he knows how that happened, but that NASA will never know it. This is a strange situation that highlights the strange tension that has prevailed for some time between NASA and the Russian Space Agency.
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Initially thought to be the result of a tiny space rock or other debris that struck the space station at high speed, it became clear later that the hole had been drilled into the side of the probe. Russia tried to determine when the hole was created, and if it was clear that it was not drilled in space, it was important to determine who had drilled the hole on Earth.
The first reports from Russia claimed that a culprit had been determined, but these reports were unsuccessful. We have never learned that anyone would be accused of sabotaging the mission. If it was just an accident, it could have been easily explained, but Russia refuses to reveal what has actually happened.
This is unfortunately not surprising. Roscosmos has been growing moody and, with NASA no longer willing to pay for seats aboard Soyuz launches to the ISS, and considering using SpaceX's Crew Dragon soon. and Boeing's Starliner, the Russian space program seems to be taking it personally.
"What happened is clear to us, but we will not tell you anything," Rogozin said in an interview with the official media RIA Novosti.
This seems rather sketchy, but it fits perfectly with Russia's well-documented inferiority complex. The country has long demonstrated its total inability to admit that something is not going according to plan. The decades-old Chernobyl disaster is, of course, the most striking example, but it is clear that it still occurs today.
Earlier this summer, Russia refused to provide information on the explosion of a missile that killed at least five scientists, preferring to downplay the magnitude of the incident's gravity. Keeping in its secrets the secret of a hole mysteriously appeared on the side of a space station used by scientists from Russia, the United States and several other countries seems perfectly commonplace in comparison.
In all likelihood, Roscosmos has discovered the cause of the damage and, because the truth will give the agency a stupid and incompetent appearance, Rogozin would simply prefer to pretend that it never happened.
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