NASA wants to fly more year-long astronaut missions, but it’s unclear when the agency will be able to do so next.
NASA’s Frank Rubio recently became the first American to spend more than 365 consecutive days in space, after his Russian Soyuz spacecraft suffered a leak, forcing him (and his two Russian crewmates) to end his stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). extendable for an additional six months.
Now NASA is considering how to bring more of the agency’s astronauts aloft for a similar length of time, following successful nearly year-long planned missions aboard the ISS with astronauts Mark Vande Hei (355 days), Scott Kelly (340 days) and Christina Koch (328 days). to dawn).
The challenge is to get a new set of spacecraft ready to support year-long missions — that is, the U.S. commercial crew vehicles from SpaceX and Boeing, NASA officials said during a livestream press conference on Thursday (Jan. 25). (All of NASA’s long-duration missions to date have launched aboard Soyuz vehicles.)
SpaceX has been regularly flying astronauts on its Crew Dragon since 2020, while Boeing’s Starliner may launch its first crewed mission in April after several technical delays. That situation makes these vehicles relatively new options for the 25-year-old ISS, and senior NASA leadership said they would like to see more service before allowing longer missions.
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Only a handful of people have spent more than a year in space, with the longest examples (up to 437 days continuously in the case of Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov) on the now-retired Soviet Mir space station. NASA is working to accumulate years in orbit to ready astronauts (and their support teams) for long-duration space missions to more distant locations, including Artemis program missions to the moon later in the 2020s and eventually human Mars missions .
Time in microgravity or “weightlessness” quickly causes many changes in the human body, including weakening of bones and muscles, along with slightly stretched eyes and shifting blood flow. NASA’s decades of developing measures to mitigate these changes are beginning to take hold; For example, in 2009 the agency changed its orbiting weightlifting machine to give astronauts stronger exercise challenges.
Astronauts lifting weights using the newer Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) on the ISS with pistons, instead of an older intermediate exercise device with resistance bands, is a factor in improving bone density for returning astronauts; This is evident from a peer-reviewed scientific article from 2019, published in the journal Bone.
These health advances are essential for longer, more ambitious space flights in the future. NASA states that a trip to Mars, using current rocket technology, would take at least six to nine months one way. Without more research into creating artificial gravity aboard a spacecraft, astronauts would most likely spend that transit time in microgravity before arriving on Mars, a world with only 38% of Earth’s gravity.
Safely setting up Red Planet equipment and navigating an alien world while recovering from “weightlessness” is a problem for astronauts studied in the medical literature. As with all astronaut science, more human subjects in weightlessness would make the results more representative and help plan future missions.
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NASA’s human research program is looking for more year-long topics, says Joe Montalbano, manager of the ISS program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. He spoke there Thursday during a press conference that focused mainly on Crew-8, the next SpaceX astronaut mission for NASA that may fly in late February.
“What we talked about [with researchers] This means that we want both Boeing and SpaceX to fly regularly to the International Space Station. Once that’s done, we’ll figure out where to place one of these one-year missions. But right now there is no immediate one [plan] – nothing in the near future – for a year-long American astronaut,” he said.
Montalbano’s comments don’t exactly rule out NASA astronauts flying more one-year Soyuz missions, as the exchange of astronauts between the US and Russia on each other’s spacecraft will continue until at least 2025. But neither Montalbano nor Sergei Krikalev, a senior official at Russia’s Roscosmos federal space agency, raised that possibility at the same news conference.
Meanwhile, two Roscosmos cosmonauts are currently conducting their own one-year missions on the ISS: Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub arrived on September 15 aboard the Soyuz MS-24 alongside NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, who after six months will embark on a separate ride to has a house. -month stay. Chub is a newcomer to space travel, but Kononenko has already completed four missions. In fact, with 736 days ahead of MS-24, Kononenko will easily break the record of 878 days in space, currently held by fellow cosmonaut Gennady Padalka.
Currently, the ISS is approved to fly until 2030, which provides another six years of opportunity to fly longer missions than the usual six months. But that timeline could potentially be extended in the future. “There’s nothing magical that happens in 2030,” Steve Stich, the manager of the commercial crew program at JSC, said at the news conference about the current 2030 extension that most partners have agreed to.
Russia has so far only committed to 2028, although Krikalev said the timing is tied to the country’s budget and not an ongoing “disagreement” with NASA. The United States and Russia are in a tense geopolitical moment thanks to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which has severed most of Russia’s international space partnerships aside from the ISS, which continues for policy reasons.
NASA officials have emphasized that station operations will remain unaffected; That said, high-level disputes have occasionally arisen over issues such as the anti-Ukrainian propaganda displayed by cosmonauts on the station.
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Whether an extension beyond 2028 (or 2030, as the case may be) is feasible for the major ISS partners is an open question. For starters, ongoing government funding must be available. Both NASA and Russia are eyeing human lunar programs in the coming decades, which in themselves are quite expensive.
Most ISS partners work with NASA on the Artemis program for human lunar missions, which imposes additional costs on other space station-affiliated countries. In turn, Russia is working with China on an independent lunar effort, which is also a sensitive issue; High-level US policy has halted most bilateral Chinese cooperation after 2011, including in space exploration, NASA’s website said.
There are other considerations going on on NASA’s side as well. The US will complete an election cycle at the end of 2024 that could influence the current direction of space policy. Meanwhile, NASA is funding numerous commercial space station options, but these may not be ready by 2030 due to funding and technology considerations, potentially leaving a gap in low Earth orbit research that NASA is trying to minimize.
Apart from when the ISS will cease operations, the question is how things can proceed if Russia leaves before other partners. The Russian and American sides of the orbiting complex are closely linked and the modules will not be able to be split apart, according to NASA materials.