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Last Thursday Nauka, the new module of the Russian space station, finally docked with the International Space Station after several technical problems on the way to the orbital laboratory. However, the problems did not end there. About three hours after connecting to the station, Nauka started firing propellants, throwing the space station out of the kilter.
This triggered “loss of severity control” procedures at NASA’s NASA Mission Control Station to train emergency astronauts and flight controllers. Then, along with Moscow flight controllers, the team ordered the station to launch its propellers into the Russian segment of the space station, as well as a Progress supply vehicle attached to the laboratory. These combined actions prevented the station from falling violently until Nauka depleted its main fuel supply.
After the loss, NASA rushed to a press conference and brought out important figures in front of the media, including Kathy Lueders, head of human spaceflight, and Joel Montalbano, head of the International Space Station program. Both said that NASA and the Russian space corporation Roscosmos were in good hands and underestimated the overall risk of the astronauts on the station and on board.
However, many questions about technical issues were delayed by Roscosmos, which has provided mixed messages. Roscosmos senior official Vladimir Solovyov, a former cosmonaut, said in an official note, “Due to a short-term software failure, the wrong order was issued to direct the removal of the module’s motors to a direct start, which led to a change in the overall orientation of the complex.”
This seems to be a software bug in the problem. But later, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, admitted that someone on the ground could have made a mistake. “Everything was going well, but there was a human factor,” he told a Russian publication. According to Reuters. “There was a bit of euphoria (after the successful docking), everyone was calm.”
When the immediate danger has passed, the most serious concerns are that these have happened and what Russia’s continued participation in the International Space Station Program may be. For NASA, the primary goal is to maintain the human presence in low Earth orbit, which means flying to the station by the end of the 2020s.
Given the probability that the wrong shotgun could have been a human error, this would be the third major problem in at least three years as a result of poor work. In October 2018, the launch of Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague was canceled after the Soyuz booster failure occurred, and the crew had to make an emergency return to Earth. Subsequent research he has found that the side-mounted booster was poorly connected to the key stage of the Soyuz rocket.
At the same time, Russia reported that there was a small hole in another Soyuz vehicle, already connected to the International Space Station. “We are able to reduce the cause to a technological fault of a technician,” Rogozin said of the problem.
These technical errors occurred because Roscosmos had difficulty paying its engineers and technicians a living wage. And now the country’s space budget is under more pressure, as NASA no longer has to buy Soyuz seats for astronauts to go to the International Space Station – thanks to the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle and, hopefully soon, Boeing’s Starliner.
Despite all this, NASA has had public support for Russia and its space program. And it should be calmed down to get to the space station without considering the enormous problems that Nauka has there and that it is functional. That is important probably cements Russian participation in the space station during this decade.
There is no guarantee of that. In recent months, Russian officials have begun to say that the hardware in Roscosmos’s orbit, many of which are more than two decades old, is aging without repair. The Russians they also suggested In 2025 they can withdraw from the program and build a new station. In fact, on Saturday, two days after the alarming berthing of Nauka, Roscosmos issued a statement saying that it was so. following the study Project for a new low-Earth orbit station called the Russian Orbital Service Station. It looks like this will be very sustainable, as Russia has neither the budget nor the capacity to build a new space station quickly.
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