Russia appears set to finally address long-term, serious space station cracks
“We threatened we would put astronauts in suits, in Dragon, to send a message to world that we disagreed,” one NASA official told Ars. “They didn’t care.”
Reaching a resolution
The standoff continued into Friday morning, when Russian astronauts appeared to back off their plans, only to subsequently approach the PrK module with a saw and the intent to remove a load-bearing bracket. Meanwhile, Roscosmos officials continued to ignore communication with NASA officials on the ground.
At this point, NASA directed Crew 12—US astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev into SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft—along with US astronaut Chris Williams, who had flown to the station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
“We felt there was a very high probability of a bad outcome happening if they sawed that bracket off,” a NASA source said. NASA’s decision to send its astronauts into...
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