WASHINGTON – A NASA astronaut who flew to the International Space Station in April could spend up to a year on the station, an extended stay he said was ‘excited’.
NASA announced on March 9 that Mark Vande Hei would fly to the space station with the Soyuz MS-18 mission on April 9. He will fly with the Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov.
In a typical mission scenario, the three would stay on the station for about six months and return after the next crew arrived on Soyuz MS-19 in October. However, Roscosmos officials have spoken of filming a movie at the station in October, sending director Klim Shipenko and an actress to be selected in an ongoing contest on Soyuz MS-19 along with Commander Anton Shkaplerov. Shipenko and the actress would return on Soyuz MS-18 with Novitsky, the commander of that mission, and Dubrov and Vande Hei should remain on the station until April 2022, when the next Soyuz crew rotation mission begins.
Vande Hei admitted in a conversation with reporters on March 15 that he can stay at the station for more than six months. “It all depends on those tourists taking off in the spacecraft in the fall, because then they’ll take my seat back,” he said.
He said he appreciates the chance of an extended stay on the ISS. “To be honest, for me it’s just an opportunity for a new life experience. I have never been in space for more than six months, “he said, referring to his first mission to the ISS, which lasted from September 2017 to February 2018.” I am very excited about it. “
That uncertain duration isn’t the only unusual aspect of the mission. NASA did not acquire the chair by purchasing it directly from Roscosmos, as in the past, but instead through an exchange with the commercial space company Axiom Space, which got the chair from Roscosmos in a deal that neither Roscosmos nor Axiom disclosed the terms of. Axiom will be given a seat on a NASA crew’s commercial mission to the ISS, likely in 2023, in exchange for the Soyuz seat.
Vande Hei said he was not involved in the seat negotiations. “I’m sure it was very complicated and challenging to work out. I know a lot of effort has gone into making it happen, ”he said. “I am very happy that it worked out like this, and I am also very happy that I did not have to deal with all those details.”
Vande Hei started training last year as a backup for Kate Rubins, the NASA astronaut who flew to the station on the Soyuz MS-17 mission last October, and then flew ‘right into’ training for Soyuz MS-18. . “The only thing that was uncertain was whether I will actually start as a result of following the training,” he said.
Roscosmos originally announced that Sergei Korsakov would join Novitsky and Dubrov on Soyuz MS-18. Vande Hei trained with those three for months, he said, knowing only three out of four people would fly. “We were ready for any contingency,” he said.
Because of that uncertainty, he said he had managed his expectations of whether he would launch. “I tried not to get too emotional, too excited about launching in April,” he said. “I didn’t realize I was doing that until I felt super excited when it was actually completed.”
Roscosmos went so far as to create two versions of the Soyuz MS-18 mission patch, one with the name of Vande Hei – seen in February in photos of training activities by Novitsky and Dubrov – and one with the name of Korsakov. In a show of camaraderie, Vande Hei said he wore the version of the patch with Korsakov’s name, while Korsakov wore the patch with Vande Hei’s name. “I will always consider him part of our team,” he said of Korsakov.
Russian media reported that Roscosmos is considering assigning Korsakov to a future Crew Dragon mission once NASA and Roscosmos reach an agreement on the exchange of seats between Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles.