International Space Station: NASA cosmonaut and two astronauts ready to return to Earth Thursday

A cosmonaut and two NASA astronauts have finished packing their Soyuz ferry on Wednesday and are preparing to leave the International Space Station on Thursday morning for a fiery descent into the Kazakhstan steppe. The trip ends on a 197 day mission including four spacewalks, a full series of searches and an emergency repair of leaks.

With Commander Oleg Artemyev at the controls, flanked to the left by Flight Engineer Drew Feustel and to the right of Ricky Arnold, the Soyuz MS-08 / 54S space shuttle was to detach from the Poisk module facing the station space at 3:57. EDT (GMT-4) to begin a trip of three hours and 48 minutes to Earth.

Feustel, the outgoing commander of the Expedition 56 crew, surrendered the station's command on Wednesday to European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, thanking the flight controllers and research teams of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, as well as in Russia, Germany and Japan.

"Thank you to those who trained us and those who supported us in the space," he said. "With more than 350 expedition-funded surveys, we should all be proud of our accomplishments, and we would like to thank our families for their support throughout this great adventure, without their love and support 39, between us would not be here today. "

Gerst, a former German astronaut, thanked Feustel "for being a true leader, it was an honor to serve under your command and to have fun at the same time."

"I wish my friends and teammates, Oleg, Ricky and Drew" a fantastic homecoming and a soft landing, "said Gerst." We miss you a lot here on Earth, and we'll miss you a lot here in the # 39; space. "

After the decommissioning, Artemyev and Feustel planned to move the Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft a safe distance from the space station before triggering the ferry's rockets at 6:51 am EDT.

The burning, which lasts four minutes and 39 seconds, is designed to slow the Soyuz by about 286 mph, leaving the other side of its orbit on a trajectory back to Kazakhstan.

After half an hour of free fall, the three modules of the spacecraft will separate and the cabin of the central crew, the only one with a protective heat shield, will sneak into the airframe. 39 atmosphere visible at an altitude of about 100 km.

If all goes well, the descent module, suspended under a single large parachute, will set up at 7:45 am (local time) for a rocket assisted landing near the town of Dzhezkazgan. This would give a 196-day, 18-hour mission, covering 3,152 orbits and 83.4 million miles since taking off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on March 21st.

As always, Russian rescue teams were waiting near the house to help the three companies returning from the station back out of the cramped cabin as they began to readjust to gravity after six and a half months of flying in space.

After brief medical examinations, the three men will be transported by helicopter to Karaganda, where they will be officially welcomed in Kazakhstan. From there, Artemyev will return home to Star City, near Moscow, while Feustel and Arnold will return home to Houston.

With the making contact, the total time of Artemyev in the space during two station visits will rise to 366 days. Feustel, a veteran of three flights, including a Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, will have recorded 226 days of altitude. Arnold will total 210 flying days on two stations.

During their stay on board the station, the trio welcomed three teammates into his outpost – Gerst, Sergey Prokopyev, commander of the Soyuz MS-09 / 55S, and NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor – Two SpaceX Dragon freighters, a Russian Progress cargo ship, a Nordrup cargo ship The Grumman Cygnus tanker and a Japanese HTV freighter carrying replacement batteries for the station's solar power system.

They also organized four outings in space. Feustel and Arnold made three trips in March, May and June to perform maintenance tasks. Artemyev joined Prokopyev in August to work on the Russian segment of the station.

Feustel has now traveled the space nine times, totaling 61 hours and 48 minutes, placing it in third place on the list of the most experienced space walkers in the world.

The crew of Expedition 56 also faced a small leak in the Soyuz MS-09 / 55S spacecraft that led Prokopyev, Gerst and Auñón-Chancellor to the station in June. The leak was discovered in the upper module of this ferry, which prompted Artemyev and Prokopyev to quickly fix the problem, with a rag soaked in epoxy.

The leak appeared to be the result of a deliberately drilled hole in the side of the module, but an investigation is not yet complete. Dimitri Rogozin, managing director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, sparked controversy when he suggested that the hole could have been drilled on the ground or in space.

This provoked a sharp response from Feustel in a later interview.

"I can say unequivocally that the crew has nothing to do with this operation in orbit, and I think it's really shameful and somewhat embarrassing that anyone was wasting their time talking about any something in which the crew was involved, "said Feustel ABC News.

"The only thing the team did was react correctly, follow our emergency procedures, locate the leak and plug the hole," he said. "In doing so, we ensured the continued operation of the space station, as well as the ability of our crew to remain in orbit and continue to perform the remarkable work we are doing … on the International Space Station."

Prokopyev, Gerst and Auñón-Chancellor will have the space station until October 11, when Soyuz MS-10 / 56S commander Alexey Ovchinin and flight engineer Tyler "Nick" Hague arrive six hours later. after the launch of the Baikonur cosmodrome.

Soyuz spacecraft are designed for crews of three people, but in this case, a cosmonaut specially trained to work with a new Russian lab module was removed from MS-10 because of the delay in launching the lab.

Gerst and The Hague intend to venture outside the Space Station on October 19 and 25 to install the six batteries on board the HTV-7 cargo ship. This will pave the way for the long-awaited launch of the new SpaceX and Boeing commercial crew bins to end NASA's dependence, after the shuttle, on Russia's Soyuz for round trip transport. at the station.

At the end of this year or early 2019, SpaceX hopes to launch its Dragon Crew commercial ferry on a non-piloted test flight to the station. The capsule should join the laboratory and dock autonomously with the outpost before returning to diving in the ocean about a month later.

Meanwhile, the crews of the station will continue to shuttle aboard the Soyuz spacecraft. On December 13, Prokopyev, Gerst and Auñón-Chancellor plan to return to Earth aboard the Soyuz MS-09 / 55S probe. They will be replaced by the crew of the Soyuz MS-11 / 57S, composed of Commander Oleg Kononenko, NASA astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques. Their launch is scheduled for December 20.

Boeing hopes to launch its Starliner capsule on an unmanned demonstration flight early next year that will look like SpaceX, with stand-alone rendezvous and docking. If all goes well with these flights, the companies will continue their preparations for launching Dragon and Starliner crews on pilot test flights later this spring.

On April 5, the Soyuz MS-12 / 58S space shuttle will send to the Oleg Skripochka station, NASA astronaut Christina Koch and a United Arab Emirates guest astronaut at the station, which will temporarily bring the station to a standstill. crew of the laboratory at eight. Ovchinin, The Hague and the UAE crew member will return to Earth on April 15, leaving five people on board the lab complex.

It's about this time that SpaceX hopes to be able to engage the Dragon crew on its first pilot-run flight, taking veterans of the shuttle Bob Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the space station. . They plan to test various manual and automated procedures to check if the spacecraft is ready to begin routine ferry flights for ferries later in the year.

According to current schedules, Boeing could be ready to do the same with the first flight of its Starliner spacecraft at the beginning of the summer. Eric Boe, Nicole Mann and Chris Ferguson, Vice President of Boeing, Commander of the Shuttle's last mission in 2011, will also be on board.

NASA has already modified Boeing's contract to protect the extension option of the first crewed Starliner flight, making it a long-term operational mission in the event of significant delays in the commercial crew program. . NASA can exercise a similar option with SpaceX.

Whatever the case may be, the last Soyuz flight currently under contract with NASA-sponsored astronauts is scheduled for launch on July 24, when the Soyuz MS-13 / 59S space shuttle will lead Alexander Skvortsov, the lonely air force. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA, Drew Morgan, in orbit. Two more Soyuz launches are planned before the end of 2019, but NASA has no space reserved for these missions.

The advent of US commercial crews will put an end to NASA's exclusive dependence on the Russians for the transport of its crew, but that will not end that.

The station needs at least one American astronaut and one cosmonaut on board to operate their respective systems. Due to the possibility of an emergency that could force a Soyuz or US commercial crew ship to leave early, two cosmonauts are expected to launch each year aboard an American spacecraft, while two astronauts fly aboard the Soyuz .

Thanks to this strategy, at least one American astronaut and one cosmonaut will be on board the station at any time, even if a medical emergency or other problem forces a ferry to leave earlier than planned.