First Belarusian cosmonaut's flight postponed till spring 2024

MOSCOW, 21 February (BelTA) – The first Belarusian cosmonaut's flight will be postponed to spring 2024 due to an abnormal situation with the Soyuz MS-22 space vehicle, BelTA learned from the Roscosmos website.

According to the source, no tasks of the flight program of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) have been canceled. They have been only postponed. The Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and the NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara will fly to the ISS on board of Soyuz MS-24 in September 2023. The flight of Belarus' first cosmonaut will be postponed by roughly half a year – from autumn 2023 to spring 2024.

The Soyuz MS-22 space vehicle was on the International Space Station in quiescent mode on 15 December 2022. A radiator was punctured and the external circuit of the vehicle's temperature control system lost pressure, with the heat transfer fluid leaking into outer space. As a result, it became impossible to withdraw heat from equipment, which gets heated during operation, in the equipment section of the Soyuz MS-22 space vehicle, maintain comfortable temperature and humidity in the habitable volume of the vehicle – the habitation module and the lander. Russian specialists found out that the non-routine situation happened because the vehicle's radiator had been hit by a sporadic micrometeoroid.

Decisions were made to return the unmanned space vehicle Soyuz MS-22 to Earth. An unmanned Soyuz MS-23 will be launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on 24 February to the ISS to bring back a crew consisting of the Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, and the NASA astronaut Francisco Rubio. Roscosmos has been forced to postpone all the subsequent launches due to this situation.