Are astronauts stuck on the ISS? A few questions and answers

[nitpicker]

https://www.dw.com/en/are-astronauts-stuck-on-the-iss-a-few-questions-and-answers/a-45861402

Are astronauts stuck on the ISS? A few questions and answers

Date 12.10.2018
Author Conor Dillon

Does Alexander Gerst and the crew of the ISS have enough food?

Yes. They have plenty of food. They will not starve. And it is good food.

Can they still get home?

Yes. There's a Soyuz spacecraft attached to the ISS that's just begging to take them all back to Earth. And they can go whenever they'd like. Yes, yes, yes, this is the same spacecraft that once had a two-millimeter hole in it.

But that hole was in a section that has no relevance whatsoever to the crew's re-entry. It'd be like discovering a hole at the airport near your gate, then boarding your perfectly safe airplane and leaving that hole far behind.

So what's the big deal then?

Right now there is no operational rocket on Earth that can bring people to the ISS. That's just... spooky, isn't it? There's no way to get up there. It just feels like we've lost an important lifeline, even if temporarily. That's how dependent we were on the Soyuz, which remains the world's most "robust, reliable and sound" manned rocket, as Thomas Reiter, the German astronaut who advises ESA's director general, told DW after the failed launch. In the tweet below, the head of Roscosmos (pictured center) loosely identifies "spring" as the time the Russian space agency hopes to fly the two crewmembers to the ISS. That's... quite a while.

That said, the "freight trains" of space, aka unmanned rockets, can still bring supplies up there. SpaceX, Boeing, and Japan's JAXA space agency all have rockets capable of doing this. So we can send stuff up there. Just not people.

OK, so we just send them supplies and they can stay up there.

No, they can't. Remember that Soyuz capsule? The one with the hole in it? It's got a battery life of 210 days (plus a "buffer," according to Reiter). So based on its arrival in August, it has to leave the ISS, with the crew inside, at some point near January 2019.

That's well before "spring."
(snip)

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Since 'August plus 210 days' is not January, here's what I think the actual dates are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-09 launched start of June; plus 210 days is start of January 2019, so that bit is correct.

And so the gap between that capsule having to come down, and either a Soyuz they have confidence in again, or the SpaceX capsule being ready to take passengers, is still there.

They could, I suppose, launch a unmanned, but ready for passengers, Soyuz with new batteries. Expensive, I guess, but maybe no more so than having to close down and then reactivate the ISS. If the crew will be physically OK to stay on past the 210 days, that is.