BAIKONUR /Kazakhstan/, September 14. /TASS/. There have been no changes in the training of the crews scheduled to go to the ISS since the depressurization of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft’s thermal control system, Oleg Kononenko, the deputy chief of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and commander of the Roscosmos team of cosmonauts, told a pre-flight news conference.
"The training course has not changed. We’ve been through it twice," Kononenko said.
This emergency situation has been included in onboard troubleshooting instructions. Now there is an approved solution to such problems, Kononenko said without elaborating.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio arrived at the ISS in September last year. Their mission was extended until September 27 this year due to a leak from the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft’s thermal control system on December 15. The unmanned Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft was dispatched to bring them back to Earth.
The launch of the Soyuz-2.1a rocket with the Soyuz MS-24 manned spacecraft is scheduled for 06:44:35 Moscow time on September 15. It will take to the ISS Oleg Kononenko, who will also become a special correspondent for TASS on the ISS, cosmonaut Nikolay Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara. O'Hara will return to Earth in the spring of 2024 on the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft, while Kononenko and Chub's mission will last until September 2024, after which they will return to Earth on the Soyuz MS-25.
It is expected that toward the end of the one-year mission Kononenko may become the first person on Earth to have stayed in space for more than a thousand days.