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WASHINGTON – A NASA astronaut flying to the International Space Station in April could spend up to a year on the station, an extended stay he said he was “enthusiastic about.”
NASA announced on March 9 that Mark Vande Hei will fly on the Soyuz MS-18 mission to the space station, starting April 9. He will fly with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrovnik.
In a typical mission scenario, the three would stay at the station for about six months, returning after the next crew arrived on Soyuz MS-19 in October. However, Roscosmos officials discussed filming a film on the station in October, sending director Klim Shipenko and an actress to be selected in an ongoing competition on Soyuz MS-19 with Commander Anton Shkaplerov. Shipenko and the actress would return to the Soyuz MS-18 with Novitsky, commander of that mission, forcing Dubrovnik and Vande Hei to remain on the station until April 2022, when the next Soyuz crew rotation mission is launched. .
Vande Hei, during a call to reporters on March 15, admitted that he could stay at the station for more than six months. “It all depends on whether these tourists get on the spacecraft in the fall, because they would take my seat back,” he said.
He said he welcomed the possibility of an extended stay on the ISS. “Honestly, for me, it’s just an opportunity for a new life experience. I’ve never been in space for more than six months, ”he said, referring to his first mission to the ISS, which lasted from September 2017 to February 2018.“ I’m really excited to this subject.
This uncertain duration is not the only unusual aspect of the mission. NASA acquired the seat not by purchasing it directly from Roscosmos, as it has done in the past, but through an exchange with the commercial spaceflight company Axiom Space, which obtained the seat from Roscosmos in a deal that neither Roscosmos nor Axiom has disclosed. Axiom will receive a seat for a NASA commercial crew mission to the ISS, likely in 2023, in exchange for the Soyuz seat.
Vande Hei said he was not involved in the negotiations for the seat. “I’m sure it was a very complicated and difficult thing to solve. I know that a lot of effort has been put into achieving this, ”he said. “I’m really happy that it worked out the way it did, and I’m also very happy that I didn’t have to deal with all of these details.”
Vande Hei started training last year as a replacement for Kate Rubins, the NASA astronaut who flew to the station on the Soyuz MS-17 mission last October, then moved on to “Headed straight for” training for the Soyuz MS-18. “The only thing that was uncertain was whether or not I was going after the training or not,” he said.
Roscosmos initially announced that Sergei Korsakov would accompany Novitsky and Doubrov on Soyuz MS-18. Vande Hei trained with these three for months, he said, knowing that only three of the four would fly. “We were ready for any eventuality,” he said.
Because of that uncertainty, he said he had managed his expectations as to whether he would pitch. “I was trying not to be too moved, too excited that I might be launching in April,” he said. “I realized I was only doing this when I felt super excited when it was finalized.”
Roscosmos went so far as to make two versions of the Soyuz MS-18 mission patch, one with the name Vande Hei – seen in February in photos of the Novitsky and Dubrovnik training activities – and one with the name Korsakov. In a show of camaraderie, Vande Hei stated that he wears the version of the patch with the name of Korsakov while Korsakov wears the patch with the name of Vande Hei. “I will always consider him part of our team,” he said of Korsakov.
Russian media reported that Roscosmos is considering assigning Korsakov to a future Crew Dragon mission once NASA and Roscosmos finalize an agreement to swap seats between Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles.
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