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Space.com reports:
Geopolitical tensions won’t keep an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts from returning to Earth together as planned this month.
NASA’s Mark Vande Hei and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov have long been scheduled to come home from the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 30. And that remains the plan, despite the strain that Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has placed on Russia’s many space partnerships.
“I can tell you for sure: Mark is coming home on that Soyuz,” Joel Montalbano, the manager of NASA’s International Space Station program, said during a news conference today (March 14). “We are in communication with our Russian colleagues; there’s no fuzz on that.”
The Verge reports:
“US astronaut Mark Vande Hei will travel back home in the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft together with Russia’s Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov on March 30,” Roscosmos said in a statement, according to TASS.
Vande Hei and the rest of his crew are slated to land in Kazakhstan, as has been the landing destination for all previous Soyuz landings. Meanwhile, NASA has also maintained that both the US space agency and Roscosmos continue to work together on the International Space Station and that operations continue as normal.
In the TASS report refuting the claims about Vande Hei, Roscosmos tried to downplay the furor. “Roscosmos has never let anybody doubt its reliability as a partner,” the corporation’s press service said.
The Evening Standard reports:
The family of an American astronaut have said they were reduced to tears after fears Russia would leave him stranded in space. In an emotional interview, Mr Vande Hei’s mother Mary told the Mail on Sunday she was reduced to tears following the outburst about the ISS from Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
The 77-year-old said: “It’s a terrible threat. When I first heard it I did a lot of crying. It’s very troubling. We are just doing a lot of praying.” Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, hit out at the sanctions put in place by President Joe Biden and suggested Mr Vande Hei could get stuck in space.
Montalbano on the return of Mark Vande Hei and two cosmonauts: “Our Roscosmos colleagues have confirmed that they’re ready to bring the whole crew home, all three of them.”
Read more here: https://t.co/sChM6fC9St
— Loren Grush (@lorengrush) March 14, 2022