A little while ago, cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Marina Vasilevskaya and astronaut Loral O’Hara returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft, which landed in Kazakhstan. Novitsky completed a one-year mission on the International Space Station, Vasilevskaya was a visitor who stayed on the Station for a few days while O’Hara spent a bit more than 6 months on the Station.
During the time spent on the International Space Station with the final part of Expedition 70, the three crew members carried out various routine maintenance activities and many scientific experiments. It’s now normal for the rotation conducted using the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to cross paths with the rotation conducted using the American SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. For this reason, over the last weeks, there was a turnover of personnel with departures and arrivals during which there were no new arrivals and departures of space cargo ships nor have spacewalks been conducted.
Typically, when there’s the departure of a Soyuz spacecraft and the start of a new Expedition, there’s also a change of commander of the International Space Station. Instead, in this case, already on March 10, Andreas Mogensen officially handed over command of the Station to cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko. The departure of the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft marked the beginning of Expedition 71.
Now cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub are still on board the International Space Station carrying out a one-year mission. The choice to carry out this type of very long mission was made by Russia to prepare for its ambitions of building a national space station. These are ambitions that have been declared for several years even if the end of the International Space Station seems to continue to be postponed.
The construction of a new space station is a remarkable undertaking for any nation, and in the coming decades, we will see how many of the proposed projects, including the private ones, will be accomplished. Russia already showed that it has major problems with multi-year delays in completing its section of the International Space Station.
