MOSCOW, June 13. /TASS/. One of the crew members of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft will have to stay on the ISS longer than the rest to organize a short-term flight of a Belarusian cosmonaut, General Director of the Roscosmos space agency Dmitry Rogozin told TASS.
"Yes, someone will have to stay longer," Rogozin said.
According to him, it is yet to be decided, what cosmonaut from the Soyuz MS-23 crew will have to stay in orbit.
"There has not been an official proposal from the Cosmonaut Training Center yet. It will appear only after we receive a list of Belarusian candidates, when we understand that our friends from Minsk are aimed at implementing this task," Rogozin added.
Now the crew of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft at the training stage includes cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Nikolay Chub and Andrey Fedyaev. Their flight is scheduled for next spring. The Belarusian cosmonaut will make a short flight in the autumn of 2023 and return on the Soyuz MS-23.
On April 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Roscosmos to organize a flight of representatives of Belarus into space on a Russian spacecraft. Then Rogozin said that the Belarusian side had to select at least two dozen candidates for space flight by June 15.