Roscosmos may require roughly a month to speed up the deployment of a replacement Soyuz return craft to the International Space Station in order to swap out the damaged Soyuz MS-22, though no formal decision has yet been announced. This possibility was reported by a knowledgeable source cited by DEA Newsciting.
There is consideration of an expedited mission for the Soyuz MS-23 to reach the ISS ahead of its originally planned schedule should the situation warrant it. The same source notes that, in the wake of the MS-22 incident, authorities have not settled on concrete steps for accelerating the MS-23 mission, leaving a range of contingency timelines on the table.
According to the source, if a decision is confirmed, the window for preparing the spacecraft could be condensed to about one month. Even at shorter lead times, the process would still require rigorous checks, safety clearances, and compatibility assessments with the ISS’s docking hardware and on-orbit power and life-support systems, all of which are critical to maintaining crew safety and mission continuity.
Currently, two Soyuz vehicles are reported to be stationed at Baikonur, namely MS-23 and MS-24, indicating that the launch manifest is prepared to respond rapidly to any development in the situation. The presence of these vehicles at the spaceport underscores Russia’s continuity plan for crew transfer and station resupply in a period of heightened caution after the MS-22 anomaly, with teams likely focusing on risk mitigation, redundancy, and mission assurance processes.
On December 15, Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin were unable to depart from the International Space Station due to a technical issue associated with the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked at the station. Roskosmos described the fault as an impediment to planned undocking operations and emphasized that all aspects of the station’s critical life-support and attitude-control systems remained within approved safety margins while engineers investigated the fault. The broader context of this incident has fueled discussions about backup maneuvers, alternate crew transfer options, and the resilience of the ISS crew rotation program across national partners, with ongoing assessments documented by independent observers and space journals (citation: DEA Newsciting).