(WWJ) – Things could get a little awkward in outer space.
American astronaut Mark Vande Hei is preparing to return to Earth after nearly a full year aboard the International Space Station with two Russian cosmonauts at the end of this month.
Fears circulated online last week that officials with the Russian space agency Roscosmos may actually leave Vande Hei stranded in space, as a potential retaliation for the U.S. supporting Ukraine amid Russian’s invasion.
But NASA says plans remain in place for him to return to Earth as planned aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The plan would be to land in Kazakhstan.
Mike Murray with the Delta College Planetarium in Bay City tells WWJ’s Erin Vee his return to Earth will most likely go according to the original plan. But Murray says if things went sour in space, there would be other options.
“We still have Crew Dragons from Space X that we could send up if we had to bring (Vande Hei) back separately and not land in Kazakhstan,” Murray said on a recent segment of “All Over the Space.”
He says there would be a lot of logistics NASA would have to figure out if Russia were to deviate from the plan.
Vande Hei has been living aboard the ISS since last April with two cosmonauts. By the end of his stay, he would hold the record for the longest continuous space flight by an American astronaut, at around 353 days.
A report from The Verge says “the source of the confusion came from a video shared by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news program, on March 5th that showed footage of Vande Hei on the ISS with his fellow Russian cosmonauts. The clip was cut together in such a way to make it seem like the Russians were going to leave him behind and then detach the Russian portion of the ISS altogether.”
Roscosmos has since said Vande Hei will return to Earth safely with cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov at the end of the month.
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