A March 30 launch to put three new crew members on the International Space Station (ISS) will be put on hold, according to reports out of Russia, due to a test failure in the Soyuz spacecraft. This is the latest breakdown in Russian space technology and the closest so far to impact manned flight safety.  It also restarts the saga of U.S. dependence upon a Russian system for access to the $100 billion space station and the "Will we have to de-man the space station?" game. Not to mention putting another question mark on the SpaceX (News - Alert) COTS 2/3 commercial supply demo flight.

RIA Novosti says ground tests of the Soyuz TMA-04 on January 22 revealed an air leak in the crew capsule. Reports from Interfax and Agence France-Press say the March 30 flight will now be postponed to mid-April or the first half of May, using the hardware for a May 30 flight. This will, in turn, push back the May 30 crew rotation to the middle or end of June, assuming other problems don't crop up along the way.

The March 30 flight from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was scheduled to carry Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and U.S. astronaut Joseph Acaba to the space station as part of a scheduled crew rotation. It isn't clear yet if the current six man crew will simply "stay over" on orbit until the two current Soyuz capsules docked at the space station hit their 210 in-orbit lifetime, or if the crews will return to Earth as previously planned. One capsule was launched in mid November while the other went up in late December to staff the space station with six people, so there is some margin available before having to operate the space station with a less-than-optimal three person crew or go to the next step of "de-manning" ISS.

Last year, the regularly scheduled ISS crew rotations were disrupted when an unmanned Progress cargo freighter crashed due to a hardware failure of the Soyuz rocket. The August crash ended up grounding the Soyuz rocket -- also used to launch the manned Soyuz spacecraft -- until new quality control measures were put into place. 

Russia's failure with the Soyuz and other rockets is not the only problem on the table in moving people up to the $100 billion space station. The U.S. Congress has failed to provide the Obama Administration with a full budget request for NASA's commercial spacecraft development program, forcing NASA to slow the pace of when it will be able to purchase trips from a U.S. company. NASA had planned to buy ISS trips in 2016 if it received $850 million in the next FY and years moving forward, but Congress only allocated $406 million -- less than half -- in FY 2012. Instead, NASA now has to plan to buy seats from the Russians through at least 2016.

On the potential upside, a delay in manned Soyuz crew rotation flights might enable SpaceX to make its COTS 2/3 commercial supply demo flight to ISS in late March or early April. SpaceX had planned for an early February launch of its Falcon 9/Dragon demo, then announced a delay for more testing. Since new crew won't be coming up on March 30, this might free up the schedule for SpaceX to conduct its launch.

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