Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.
With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.
Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev.
Credit:
Roscosmos
"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.
Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.
With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.
Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev.
Credit:
Roscosmos
"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.
Ten days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.
At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.
NASA directed astronauts on the ISS to shelter in a Crew Dragon spacecraft after Russian cosmonauts planned to perform repairs the agency thought created “elevated risk” to the station.
NASA instructed astronauts on the International Space Station to briefly shelter in a Dragon spacecraft June 5 as cosmonauts attempted to repair an air leak in a Russian module.
Os quatro astronautas da missão Crew-12 foram instruídos pela NASA a vestir os fatos espaciais e a refugiarem-se na cápsula Dragon, enquanto cosmonautas russos tentam uma reparação mais extensa no módulo Zvezda.
NASA confirmed Thursday that the Russian segment of the International Space Station has begun leaking atmosphere into space again. It's an old problem that NASA recently hoped was resolved.
For more than half a decade, engineers from Roscosmos and NASA have been tracking the leak rate from a small Russian module attached to the space station that leads to a docking port. The source of these leaks, microscopic structural cracks, have been difficult to find and address.
In January, NASA said that after multiple inspections and sealant applications, the pressure inside this segment, known as the PrK module, had reached a "stable configuration." The PrK module is essentially a transfer tunnel attached to the Zvezda Service Module on the Russian segment of the space station.
It's difficult to know the true state of the Russian economy, both because the country's financial reporting is sparse and because official figures are unreliable. But things probably aren't great.
This week, Sweden's minister of foreign affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, shared her country's assessment that the Russian economy has likely contracted over the last five years amid the war in Ukraine. Inflation is also high, and international sanctions have cost Russia $450 billion since the onset of the war in February 2022. Russia's economy is currently smaller than that of Texas, Stenergard said.
By most measures, then, the economy is not in tip-top shape. Moreover, the war is draining a large amount of the country's financial resources, with defense spending reaching a post-Soviet record of about 7 percent of government spending.