What is the status of the International Space Station (ISS) and its crew?
The crew is safe. But eventually astronauts Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin must be retrieved, and the best way to do that is with a shuttle. On Sunday, Feb. 2, a previously planned launch of an unmanned Russian supply ship, called Progress, went off as scheduled. It docked with the station two day later and the station crew unloaded one ton of food, fuel and other supplies. They crew now has enough supplies to last through late June. The earliest they would likely come home is early May after a fresh Soyuz spacecraft is launched with a new crew. But the crew says they are prepared to stay a year if needed. A shuttle launch had been scheduled for March 1 to swap ISS crews, but that is on hold. NASA must now decide if and when it is safe to launch another shuttle. Aboard the ISS are. If need by, the station crew could return in a Russian Soyuz, a “lifeboat” capsule that is always affixed to the orbiting outpost. NASA space station official Michael Kostelnik sai
