The International Space Stationis taken by Atlantis' STS-135 crew during a fly around as the shuttle departed the station on 19 July 2011.
Credit: AFP/NASA
WASHINGTON: The risk of an unprecedented evacuation of the International Space Station will spike if Russian craft cannot return by November.
Russia delayed its next manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) by at least a month after an unmanned cargo vessel crashed into Siberia instead of reaching orbit on 24 August 2011. The head of Russia's manned spaceflight programme has warned that a significantly longer delay would force the six people on board the station to abandon the orbiter due to fatigue and supply problems.
"The risk increase is not insignificant," agreed Michael Suffredini, the ISS program manager for NASA. "There is a greater risk of losing the International Space Station (ISS) when it's unmanned than if it were manned."
Commanding from the ground
The station crew normally consists of six - currently three Russians, two Americans and one Japanese - working six-month rotations.
Staff safety and the "very big investment" that the Russian and U.S. governments have made in the ISS would guide future decisions, Suffredini said.
"We prefer not to operate in that condition without crew on board for an extended period of time just to make sure we end up in that situation. But assuming the systems keep operating we can command the station from the ground and operate it on orbit indefinitely," he added.
Planned evacuation
The ISS, which orbits 350 km above Earth, is a platform for scientific experiments bringing together space agencies from Russia, the United States, Europe, Japan and Canada. Launched in 1998, it was initially expected to remain in space for 15 years until an agreement was reached to keep it operating through 2020.
An evacuation of the ISS was planned after the Columbia shuttle disaster which killed seven astronauts in 2003, but NASA later decided to keep staff on board the station at all times.
Russian officials expect the next manned launch of its Soyuz craft to take place in late October or early November - it had initially been scheduled for September 22. A crew comprising Russians Andrei Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev and NASA astronaut Ron Garan went up to the ISS in March to honour the 50th anniversary of the first voyage of space pioneer Yuri Gagarin.
But this month's failed launch was a spectacular blow for Russia after it had become the sole nation capable of taking humans to the ISS after the July withdrawal of the U.S. space shuttle.
