NASA Assessing Crew Dragon’s Ability to Accommodate All Seven ISS Crew

As NASA and Roscosmos determine what to do about the Soyuz MS-22 situation, one potential option is using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endurance to bring all seven ISS crew members home. Crew Dragon actually is designed for seven people, but NASA needs only four seats so that is the number in Endurance right now. NASA is asking SpaceX what it would take to accommodate the three who arrived on Soyuz MS-22 as well.

Russia’s Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which delivered two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut to the ISS in September and is supposed to bring them home in March, sprang a leak two weeks ago releasing all the coolant in one of its cooling loops.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos is trying to determine what happened and whether the spacecraft can maintain a thermal environment safe enough to transport the crew or if another Soyuz needs to be sent up empty for them to use instead for the return trip.

NASA and Roscosmos are working closely together since an American astronaut is part of the Soyuz MS-22 crew.

Also aboard the ISS right now are four crew members who arrived on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endurance — Crew-5, composed of two Americans, a Japanese, and a Russian.

In an update posted on the ISS blog this afternoon, NASA said another option under consideration is whether all seven could fit in Endurance.

As a part of the analysis, NASA also reached out to SpaceX about its capability to return additional crew members aboard Dragon if needed in an emergency, although the primary focus is on understanding the post-leak capabilities of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft.

A NASA spokesman confirmed to SpacePolicyOnline.com that “the team is looking at the capability of the Dragon already at the International Space Station” to return additional crew, not sending up another Crew Dragon that might be outfitted differently.

SpaceX advertises Crew Dragon as capable of carrying seven, but each of the flights so far has carried four and the company’s promotional video shows four seats.

SpaceX has flown Crew Dragons with people aboard six times for NASA (Demo-2, Crew-1, Crew-2, Crew-3, Crew-4 and Crew-5) and twice for private astronauts (Inspiration4 and Axiom-1). The spacecraft are reusable. Four exist right now — Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance and Freedom — and another is under construction. Crew-5 is the second flight of Endurance.

A decision on what to do about the Soyuz MS-22 situation is expected in January. NASA and Roscosmos insist there is no rush because the crew is safe inside the ISS. The blog post today was mostly a routine update on what the crew members are doing accompanied by a festive photo of the U.S.-segment crew members (Mann, Cassada, Rubio, and Wakata).

However, Soyuz and Crew Dragon also are the lifeboats they would need in the event of an emergency evacuation.

Nominally, Soyuz MS-23 is scheduled for launch in mid-March with the replacements for Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio, but Roscosmos says it could move that up by two or three weeks and launch it empty if necessary. Soyuz can rendezvous and dock with the ISS autonomously.

The U.S.-Russian-Japanese-European-Canadian International Space Station has been permanently occupied by international crews rotating on roughly 4-6 month schedules for more than 22 years.