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Comment by photonair | Hacker News Reader

Does someone know if push come to shove, do they have a ready to go escape pod or ship to go back Earth anytime in an emergency? How many backups do they get?

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The rule is that at all times enough return vessels must be docked to the ISS for everyone on board.

These are usually the same vessels they used to get up to the station.

This has the consequence that if they need to re-dock one of the vessels (for whatever reason) all the astronauts that would normally use that vessel must board it for that menuvre. Just in case it fails to dock again.

And they don't normally have spares.

IIRC, this is a good video on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=82YHM12n2JI

There is spare capacity on the Crew Dragon for an extra astronaut or maybe two on return. They'd rather not have to use it but NASA took steps to enable it when Soyuz MS-22 suffered a coolant leak in 2022 and had to be returned empty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-22

For every human onboard ISS there is always place in the docked spaceship. Exceptions: when spaceships break, replacements are usually sent - like, when Soyuz lost coolant or Starliner was considered too unreliable. While waiting for replacements, those ploblematic spacecrafts still serve as lifeboats, except maybe Crew Dragons can carry more people than those 4 they usually carry...

Crew Dragon can do 7 astronauts, but NASA only wanted SpaceX to build it for 4.

The contingency for the Starliner astronauts in case of an emergency was to strap them down in the cargo area. Which wouldnt be optimal, but better than certain/likely death onboard the ISS.

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