Month: September 2011

Washington, 6 sep (EFE).-the American space station astronauts have begun some tasks to leave station space international (EEI) in the best conditions in the event that in November have to leave.

U.S. astronauts Mike Fossum and Ron Garan, two of the six members of the current permanent crew of the space complex, indicated in a meeting with the press broadcast by NASA that is still too early but “there is much work to do”.

Ground staff working on contingency plans that the station had to operate without crew time, once the failure of a Russian rocket similar to driving the spacecraft Soyuz – which are staff – relay has been forced to stop the releases.

The astronauts do not yet have specific instructions but have chosen to advance work with small preparations, as recording on video some of their tasks to update and train quickly the crew to launch the ISS.

“Teams in Houston are in the preliminary stages of deciding everything, from what ventilation are going to leave running, what lights are going to leave on, under what conditions will be each experiment, each tank, each valve, each hatch, there is much to do”, said the veteran Fossum.

The past August 24 unmanned space freighter crashed shortly after its release due to a failure of the booster rocket, Soyuz-U, the same spacecraft Soyuz, the only ones with which the crew replacements can be used since the United States.UU. withdrew its space. ferries

The Russian Agency Roscosmos temporarily suspended missions had planned to find the cause of the problem in this model of rocket, which failed for the first time after 30 years in the service of the Russian space agency.

It was intended that three of the six crew of the ISS – the Russians Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev, as well as Garan-, back September 8 in one of the two ships Soyuz coupled to the station, but his return has been postponed until the middle of month that the station can operate at maximum performance.

Before the return of Fossum, Russian Sergei Volkov and Japanese Satoshi Furukawa, scheduled for November 16, scheduled for release on September 22, another ship Russian with the three crew of replacement of the first group, which has also been postponed.

The problem would be that if the Russians did not managed to determine the cause that led to the failure in the rocket the six would have to return to earth before that reach their replacements, since coupled to the ISS Soyuz spacecraft have also established a time life orbital security for six months.

Fossum pointed out that even NASA is working with many hypotheses, but acknowledged that the margin of time is not much and the cause “after hundreds of launches successfully” is not the task easy.

“A brief pause is not a big problem,” said Fossum, who noted, however, that longer is likely without crew there arises a problem. The danger would be that it was something that required human presence and continue without crew.

Such problems would, for example, if it fails – as happened last year–a bomb of the cooling system of the station, which could make more vulnerable ISS to other failures.

The astronauts were quiet and highlighted the work of the ISS, a project of $ 100 billion in which they work 16 countries, which hosts hundreds of experiments of science, medicine, engineering and materials that give returns in the land.

“The money will be returned multiplied to Earth”, said Garan, who emphasized that the ISS is a “good overall” that must be maintained.

“The ISS is a place that we should be proud,” stressed Fossum, who said: “If we have to close it for a while, the leave the best possible way so that the next crew come only have to turn on the lights and put back to work”. EFE