State Space Corporation Roscosmos Looking Into Possibility of Manufacturing Defect on Leaky Soyuz
Written by Reananda Hidayat PermonoCompleted Master of Science - MS, Petroleum Geology from Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos is investigating the coolant leaks of two of its spacecraft in a two-month span recently.
Last December, a Soyuz MS spacecraft docked at the International Space Station lost its coolant to space.
Russian officials soon attributed this issue to a likely micrometeoroid strike.
On Feb. 11, a robotic freighter at the ISS sprung a leak of its own.
Later, Roscosmos tied that issue to an “external factor,” possibly because it occurred due to the cargo craft’s October 2022 launch.
However, that’s far from a final verdict.
According to NASA’s ISS program manager Joel Montalbano, the back-to-back incidents have prompted State Space Corporation Roscosmos to be concerned about the spacecraft manufacturing process.
Besides the micrometeoroid orbital debris (MMOD) element, Roscosmos is looking at the manufacturing process.
Montalbano explained that issue during a press conference that discussed SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission a few hours earlier.
Roscosmos started to think the leaky Soyuz MS-22 was unfit to carry its three astronauts: NASA’s Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev.
Therefore, Russia launched Soyuz MS-23 to replace the leaky one last month.
Montalbano expressed his confidence in the new Soyuz, but NASA will keep waiting for further developments.
That’s done on both the NASA side and the Roscosmos side.