Three Russian cosmonauts were due for launch on Friday to the International Space Station (ISS), continuing a two-decade-plus shared Russian-US presence aboard the orbiting outpost despite heightened terrestrial tensions between Moscow and Washington.
The Soyuz spacecraft carrying the new cosmonaut team was set for lift-off at 1555 GMT (11:55 a.m. Eastern time) from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin a three-hour-plus ride to the space station.
Soyuz commander Oleg Artemyev will lead the team, joined by two spaceflight rookies, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, on a science mission aboard ISS set to last six and half months.
They will join the station’s current seven-member crew to replace three who are scheduled to fly back to Earth on March 30 — cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov and US NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.
Vande Hei will have logged a NASA record-breaking 355 days in orbit by the time he returns to Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz capsule with his two cosmonaut peers.
Remaining aboard the ISS with the newcomers until the next rotation a couple months later are three NASA astronauts — Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron — and German crewmate Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency.
Those four crew members arrived together in November aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-month stint in orbit.
Launched in 1998, the research platform orbiting some 400 kilometers above Earth has been continuously occupied since November 2000 while operated by a US-Russian-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
The latest change in ISS personnel comes as the durability of longstanding US-Russian collaboration in space is tested by heightened antagonism between the two former Cold War adversaries over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As part of US economic sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government last month, US President Joe Biden ordered high-tech export restrictions against Moscow that he said were designed to “degrade” Russia’s aerospace industry, including its space program.
Dmitry Rogozin, director-general of Russian space agency Roscosmos, immediately lashed out in a series of tweets suggesting the US sanctions could “destroy” ISS teamwork and lead to the space station itself falling out of orbit.
A week later, Rogozin retaliated by announcing Russia would stop supplying or servicing Russian-made rocket engines used by two US aerospace NASA suppliers, suggesting US astronauts could use “broomsticks” to get to orbit.
At about the same time, Moscow said it had ceased joint ISS research with Germany and forced the 11th-hour cancelation of a British satellite launch from Baikonur.
The Roscosmos chief also said last month that Russia was suspending its cooperation with European launch operations at the European Spaceport in French Guiana.
The ISS itself was born in part from a foreign policy initiative to improve US-Russian relations following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War hostility that spurred the original US-Soviet space race.
But Rogozin’s recent actions have prompted some in the US space industry to rethink the NASA-Roscosmos partnership.
Ann Kapusta, executive director of nonprofit space advocacy group the Space Frontier Foundation, said in a recent statement that the United States should end its ISS collaboration with Russia.
Kapusta, a onetime ISS research operations lead for NASA, said “toxic behavior” by Rogozin “shows there is no distance between Roscosmos and Putin’s war machine,” and that Russia can no longer be trusted to safely cooperate in space.
NASA officials, for their part, insist that US and Russian ISS crew, while aware of events on Earth, were still working together professionally and that geopolitical tensions had not infected the space station.
Addressing the US space agency’s 60,000 employees in a video “town hall” on Monday, NASA chief Bill Nelson said: “NASA continues working with all our international partners, including State Space Corporation Roscosmos, for the ongoing safe operations” of the space station.
NASA this week posted a fact sheet outlining the technical interdependency of the US and Russian segments of the space station.
For example, while US gyroscopes provide day-to-day control over ISS orientation in space and US solar arrays augment power supplies to the Russian module, Russia provides the propulsion used to keep the station in orbit.
Russian cosmonauts set for Friday launch to International Space Station
https://arab.news/47x7c
Russian cosmonauts set for Friday launch to International Space Station
- Soyuz spacecraft carrying the new cosmonaut team set for lift-off at 1555 GMT
- Soyuz commander Oleg Artemyev will lead the team, joined by two spaceflight rookies
In Philippine presidential palace, staffers share generations of haunted stories
- Built in 1750, Malacanang has been serving as seat of power since Spanish colonial times
- Ghost tales are so ingrained in the palace that staffers find it difficult to avoid their impact
MANILA: In Malacanang, the presidential palace of the Philippines, residents come and go usually every five years, but some are believed to have lingered for centuries, haunting its historical corridors with their mysterious presence.
Built in 1750 as a summer house for a Spanish aristocrat, the palace was acquired by the Spanish government in 1825 and served as the residence of the colonial governor-general — first of Spain and from 1898, the US. When the Philippines gained full independence in 1946, it remained its seat of power.
The building’s halls and walls have seen centuries of history and remain witnesses not only to politics but also to episodes that those who have worked there say they had to accustom themselves to: from phantom footsteps to a headless figure wearing the barong — the traditional Filipino shirt — complaining voices, or a waiter reporting for work long after his death.
Ignacio Bunye, press secretary during the administration of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, told Arab News that some officials, including Eduardo Ermita — executive secretary of the Philippines from 2004 to 2010 — took it seriously.
“In Secretary Ermita’s office, you’ll see so many medallions and little images of the Virgin Mary pasted on the windows. He even had his office blessed every now and then. Word is there’s a lot of strange apparitions in his office,” Bunye said.
“There are also stories about the sound of chains — clinking or being dragged. They hear those in other offices.”
Ghost tales are so ingrained in the palace environment that it is difficult to avoid their impact.
One evening, when Bunye stopped by his office after a palace dinner, he heard footsteps outside and then someone tried to turn his room’s doorknob.
“Fortunately, the door had automatically locked when I came in. I felt my hair stand on end. After a while, the footsteps moved away,” he said.
Once everything was quiet, he hurried out of the room and in the hallway saw a white-haired man in a suit, who slowly turned toward him and in a raspy voice, asked: “How do I get out of here?”
The person turned out to be his colleague.
“I sighed in relief. It was Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales,” Bunye said. “He had only been appointed to the Cabinet a week earlier and still didn’t know his way around the palace.”
But others who recall scary sightings have found no rational explanation. A documentary film released by Malacanang for last year’s Halloween had some of them share their stories.
Sgt. Ramson Gordo, a member of the Presidential Security Group, was on night duty when he noticed something odd in the main lobby. He saw three guards wearing the barong, while he knew there could be only two. When he approached the lobby and asked about the third man, he was told there were only two of them.
“There’s also a story of someone who took a photo of the palace’s main lobby. That was also nighttime and there was no one in there,” Gordo said. “When he looked at the picture, there was a person wearing a barong, but with no head.”
Riza Mulet, who usually arrives at work at 6:30 a.m., recounts seeing a man greeting her in the morning.
“He wasn’t familiar to me, but he said, ‘Good morning,’ so I greeted him back … I turned to look at him, but suddenly, he was gone,” she said.
When she told her colleagues that a tall man with a smiling face who looked like a waiter had greeted her and she asked if they knew him, they went silent and told her he had died during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her second sighting was during a tour of the palace. She saw a man standing beside two antique chairs that had been used by former presidents.
“We were joking, teasing, saying ‘We will sit on them’. Then he got angry, really angry … I made the mistake of looking him in the eyes, so I just bowed my head because he came closer to me. My hands turned cold, and my hair stood on end,” Mulet said.
Her colleagues pulled her away from the place — not all of them aware of what had happened.
“You have to learn to coexist with those who can’t be seen by most people. I can see them, but not everyone can,” she said.
“You have to learn to live with them.”
