The MS-22 Soyuz started venting liquid into space back in December
and now it sounds like NASA and Roscosmos are going to announce that it’s going to be unable to return its crew because of the damage
Not a fun time to be Sergey Prokopiev, Dmitry Petelin, or Francisco Rubio. The proposed solution from the article is to have two launches next month, one Soyuz and one SpaceX each launch with enough empty seats to bring the 3 stranded (cosmo/astro)nauts back.
Would be pretty hesitant to fly home on Russian craft for fear of doing 20 yrs for intergalactic drug trafficking. Then on other hand got a Elon product
Is the problem here that MS-22 was their way to and from the ISS, and now it’s fucked, so we need to send up another ship to save them?
At least in Kerbal Space Program your Kerbals don’t have limited life support resources
Yeah, your ride to the ISS also acts as your lifeboat in case shit hits the fan and is your ride back to Earth when your mission is over. Right now if something goes wrong with the ISS the 7 people on board are going to all have to try to come back on the Dragon that’s docked to the station, 4 in the seats they came up on and the 3 crew from MS-22 just kinda holding onto the floor. It’s a very Harold situation
not all launches make it
As the James Webb Space Telescope views swaths of sky spotted with distant galaxies, multiple teams have found that the earliest stellar metropolises are more mature and more numerous than expected. The results may end up changing what we know about how the first galaxies formed.
SpaceX loaded 10,000,000 pounds of propellant into their Starship full stack today for the first time and someone put together a neat comparison of how much all that weight made the Super Heavy booster compress:
The booster turns white because the propellant is super chilled liquid methane and oxygen so the stainless steel skin frosts up. They also point out that it’s at least partially the metal itself contracting from the cold.
Small asteroid coming within 2200 miles of Earth:
That’s the kind of gravity assist that makes me go 
in Kerbal Space Program
2,200 miles? That’s within geosynchronous orbit! Hope we get cool pictures.
Maybe we should do something about all the useless crap we’ve sent into LEO?
There have been a few tests of cleaning up smaller debris but bigger stuff like this is going to be tricky to get rid of. Maybe if SpaceX really does build the “chomper” variant of Starship they can use it like Pac-Man to go grab some of the larger junk.
What’s the downside risk of defunct LEO hitting each other? That they fall to earth and don’t break up?
They’d be broken up by the atmosphere if they managed to just fall out of orbit, the real risk is breaking up into small pieces that stay in orbit eventually leading to Kessler syndrome.
That and it being difficult to tell where they’re going to go after they hit each other, would be a horrible bank shot if debris from the collision took out the space station.
I guess I’m just having a hard time visualizing how the odds of these types of collisions aren’t negligible. I mean low earth orbit, even if every one of these things is orbiting at the same altitude, is necessarily multiples larger than the surface of the earth. If all of these objects were just driving around on the surface of the earth, that surface is so vast that it woudl seem like a collision between any of them would be vanishingly small, and this is an even larger area. What am I missing?
I don’t really know the math, but it seems to me if an object has any kind of drift in it’s orbit, eventually it will cover a much larger width of available space at that altitude than if it just did a ring. Like the difference between the first strand of yarn you wrap about a ball and hundredth wrap?
They’re not! The ISS sometimes has to maneuver out of the way of space debris. It’s kind of a big problem for space exploration.
space is huge
