Russia and NASA are still evaluating whether a leaky Soyuz spacecraft is safe to return three International Space Station crew members home.
"Our next crew ... was scheduled to fly in the middle of March," said Sergei Krikalev, head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, during the livestreamed NASA press conference.
The new Soyuz on the ground planned for that crew could instead be launched empty to retrieve the three ISS crew members if they are indeed stranded. But Krikalev said it can only be"sent up a little earlier ... about two, three weeks earlier is at the maximum what we can do at this point.
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