14 leak prompted mission controllers in Moscow to call off the spacewalk as a live NASA webcast showed a flurry of snowflake-like particles erupting from behind the Soyuz spacecraft.
The leak lasted for hours and emptied the radiator of the coolant used to control the temperature inside the spacecraft’s crew compartment. NASA has said that no ISS crew was ever at risk from the leak.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin, who were then suited for spacewalks, flew to the ISS in September aboard the now-crippled Soyuz MS-22 capsule with American astronaut Frank Rubio.
They were originally supposed to go back home in March on the same spacecraft, but Krikalev and NASA’s ISS program manager, Joel Montalbano, said Roscosmos would agree to launch an empty crew capsule to space if Russian space officials decide to. Will return them to Earth two or three weeks earlier. their recovery.
Four other ISS crew members — two more from NASA, a third Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut — boarded the ISS via the NASA-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon in October and remain aboard the station with their capsule.
