Stranded ISS astronauts are getting a new Soyuz to ride home Russian space agency Roscosmos has decided to send another Soyuz capsule to the International Space Station to rescue crew stranded by a coolant leak in their return ride. The leak in the Soyuz MS-22 craft's coolant system was caused by a micrometeor and was noticed ahead of a planned mid-December spacewalk that was canceled …
Going forward, every astronaut gets suits for both launch vehicles before their mission....
Though something I have been wondering about, does Russia even have a replacement for MS-23? How long can they continue to build capsules with the sanctions?
Although it is possible to return to Earth without a flight suit it has not been tried since Soyuz 11. There are some EMU suits on the ISS but those are good for 8 hours - only useful if bad things happen towards the end of the return journey. Those suits are getting old and require considerable bravery to use even within a short spacewalking distance of the inside of a space station.
Soyuz crews come with Sokol (Falcon :-) suits and you could wear one inside a Dragon capsule. When there has cabin pressure they recirculate air with the cabin. If the cabin depressurises then you have a two hour supply of bottled oxygen. Trying to extend that to six hours by killing the the other two crew members won't work because the oxygen supply is not sufficient to prevent a fatal heat build up.
I could not find much information about the Starliner flight suits. Presumably they connect to Starliner's CO2 scrubbers, oxygen supply, electrical power and LAN like a Dragon suit and would keep you alive all the way back to Earth. In theory the connectors could have been made compatible with each other but if that had been made a requirement then NASA would still be buying Soyuz seats to the ISS.
I did a quick look at older flight suits to see if both sides could have been required to use an existing standard. The ACES from the shuttle looks about as useful as a Sokol. The suits intended for the Orion capsule might be ready by Q2 2025. SpaceX has offered their own suits for use on Orion. Despite Elon's current popularity the idea sounds good to me. It would be nice if the first crewed Orion had a life support system that had actually been tested in space and it would be handy to use the same suits on Orion, Starship and Dragon. Compatibility with Starliner would be a bonus but I have not yet seen evidence stat Starliner will fly after they run out of Atlases.
You would have thought that at least for American space-faring companies and suppliers that NASA could have insisted on a "standard" to be used for all connections to a flight suit....and as time wore on, that they would all be backwardly compatible, perhaps with physical adaptors?
After all, there are only a few things that are needed in a "rated" flight suit to keep a space-traveller alive for re-entry: air-mix/oxygen supply, cooling system and maybe health monitors.
Having proprietary flight suits just seems to be a money making exercise to extract more dollars from NASA. :-(
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Suits are tailored to astronauts while on the ground. An off-the-peg suit is certainly better than hoping the capsule does not spring a leak or catch fire on the way home (one way to put out a fire is to dump the atmosphere). The suits plug into the capsule's life support systems. If there are only four sockets ...
Dragons hit the sea with a considerable bump. You might not need a flight suit but you will need a comfy chair your size. Dragon was originally intended to carry seven crew. NASA decided to go with a crew of 4 and more cargo. It is possible the hard points for mounting three more chairs are still there but the landing system is now only rated for 4 crew. All 7 would would land hard and only the truly desperate would use an improvised seat.
Sending a crew dragon with only one passenger up to bring the other three back could be done with made to measure suits and chairs but they would not get the extensive testing for a good fit. Better than a Soyuz with no cooling but not as good as a new Soyuz with the existing flight suits.
When the alternative is "or you die," all of the options sounded acceptable. And those guys they send up are pretty smart, I'm sure they could rig the seats in the Soyuz in the Dragon, and figure a way to keep the air going for an emergency type re-entry. It's not like they'd have anything to lose by trying.
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