The International Space Station will soon be reduced to a skeleton crew.
On Thursday, January 8, NASA announced that it would bring the four SpaceX astronauts Crew-11 assignment return to Earth sooner to resolve a health problem with one of the crew members. We don’t yet know when this will happen; an update is expected in the coming days.
The departure of the quartet will leave International Space Station (ISS) with only three resident astronauts – Christopher Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of NASA and Sergei Mikayev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Although the medevac will be a first for the ISS, a three-person crew is far from unprecedented.
As of 2020, the nominal crew size of the ISS is seven astronauts. The previous baseline, created in 2009was six years old. But before that, the standard, which lasted for almost a decade, was three.
Williams will be the only astronaut on the US segment of the ISS after Crew 11 departs, but NASA is confident he can handle the responsibility.
“Chris is trained to perform any task we would ask him to perform on the vehicle,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said during a press conference Thursday afternoon (January 8).
He noted that Williams would benefit from considerable help.
“Of course, we also perform many operations on the vehicle from our various control centers all over the world, including commercial control centers that operate many of our research payloads,” Kshatriya said. “So thousands of people will be looking over his shoulder, as our teams do all the time to ensure groundbreaking science continues.”
Kud-Sverchkov and Mikayev — who flew to the ISS November 27 with Williams aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft — could also lend a hand if needed, according to Kshatriya.
“The Russians with him — first of all, they trained closely together. They are a great team; they work very well together,” Kshatriya said. “But they are also qualified to operate American systems in advisory or assistant mode and can, if necessary, be called upon, with the assistance of the MCC (Mission Control Center) in Houston or the MCC in Moscow, to assist in any operation.”
The transition to reduced crew mode will of course have certain impacts on ISS operations. We will not carry out as much scientific work with only three astronauts on board instead of seven, for example.
And NASA won’t be able to carry out any spacewalks, which require two people. The ISS will therefore be more vulnerable to emergency situations such as hardware malfunctions, as stated by a former Canadian astronaut. Chris Hadfield noted.
Speaking of spacewalks: The medical problem occurred on the eve of a extravehicular activity of January 8 now canceled (EVA), which was to be led by NASA’s Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman.
Fincke and Cardman are Crew-11 astronauts. Their two teammates on the EspaceX The mission is made up of the Japanese Kimiya Yui and the cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.
The agency did not identify which astronaut on Crew 11 experienced the health problem, citing privacy concerns, but said it had nothing to do with the EVA or its preparations. NASA wants to return the affected crew member home as soon as possible to diagnose the problem using the most advanced and comprehensive medical equipment available here on Earth.
Crew-11 arrived at the orbiting laboratory on August 2 aboard a Crew Dragon capsule and virtually completed its planned six-month mission.
Crew-11 astronauts were supposed to stay on board the ISS until the four people arrived Crew-12. The Crew-12 launch is currently scheduled for mid-February, but NASA is considering speeding up the liftoff.
Since we don’t have a firm departure date for Crew-11 or a clear launch date for Crew-12, it’s unclear how long Williams, Kud-Sverchkov, and Mikayev will have the orbiting lab to themselves. But short-crew operations – a trip to the past for the ISS – could end up lasting about a month.
