After a delay, the NASA mission control centre in Houston reported that the recently docked Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft had a longer than expected burn on 15 October during a test firing of its engines, which was only shut down when a propellant limit was reached. The anomaly did briefly affect the orientation of the International Space Station (ISS) to which it was docked, but this was soon recovered.
Soyuz MS-18 was launched with its crew of cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, Cosmonaut Peter Dubrov and NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei on 9 April 2021, docking with the ISS on the same day.
On 28 September the spacecraft undocked from the ISS Rassvet module with its crew aboard and made a docking port relocation to the Nauka module. This meant that there were two Soyuz craft docked with the ISS. Soyuz MS-19 was launched to the ISS on 5 October, docking with it on the same day using its back-up manual procedure after an anomaly with the automated system. Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, Actress Yulia Peresild and Film Director Klim Shipenko were carried to the ISS on Soyuz MS-19 in order to film parts of a movie called The Challenge about a surgeon played by Yulia Peresild making an emergency medical trip to the ISS.
The thruster fault threatened to prevent the return of Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko along with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky on the Soyuz MS-18/ISS-64S if its thruster fuel reserves were not enough. However, in the end all was well. Having undocked from the station’s Nauka multi-purpose lab module at 0114 GMT on 17 October, the crew and their Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft returned as planned on the same day, with a de-orbit burn and re-entry ahead of the descent module’s safe parachute and rocket-assisted landing at 0435 GMT on the Kazakh Steppe in Kazakhstan.
Concerns remain about the safety of Russian thrusters and their control systems. On 29 July, the ISS was seriously destabilised after a thruster inadvertently fired due to a software error on the recently docked Nauka module.
The ISS a human LEO outpost and science station which will soon also become a film set. Courtesy of NASA
Post Script: The uncrewed re-supply spacecraft Progress MS-17/ISS-78P undocked from the Poisk module of the ISS at 2342 GMT on 20 October 2021. The spacecraft moved away from the ISS for just over 24 hours before returning to the space station and docking automatically at the recently vacated (by Soyuz MS-18) Nauka module. The re-supply spacecraft docked automatically at 0421 GMT on 22 October 2021 to the space station’s Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module. A series of checks for any leaks in the Nauka module’s propellent lines will be carried out before they are used with the new module’s thrusters for orientation control of the station. The Progress MS-18 spacecraft docked to the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module of the ISS at 0131 GMT on 30 October 2021.
