Cosmonaut removed from SpaceX’s Crew 12 mission for violating national security rules: report
A Russian spaceflyer was pulled from SpaceX’s next astronaut mission for violating U.S. national security regulations, according to a media report.
Oleg Artemyev, of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, had been manifested on SpaceX’s Crew 12, a four-person mission scheduled to launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) as early as February.
Fellow cosmonaut Andrei Fedyayev recently took his place, a “decision made in connection with Oleg Artemyev’s transfer to another job,” Roscosmos officials said today (Dec. 2) in a statement (in Russian; translation by Google). But that’s not the whole story, according to the Russian investigative site The Insider.
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This morning, The Insider reported that Artemyev, 54, was apparently removed from Crew 12 for violations of ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), a U.S. law that seeks to safeguard national security by restricting the dissemination of sensitive information and technology.
“The cosmonaut allegedly photographed SpaceX documentation and then ‘used his phone’ to export classified information,” The Insider wrote (in Russian; translation by Google), citing the work of launch analyst Gregory Trishkin.
“My contacts confirm that a violation occurred and an interdepartmental investigation has been launched,” Trishkin told The Insider. “Removing someone from a mission two and a half months before the mission without a clear explanation is more of an indirect sign, but it’s indicative. It’s very difficult to imagine a situation in which an experienced cosmonaut could inadvertently commit such a gross violation.”
The Insider also cited a Sunday (Dec. 1) report by a Russian-spaceflight channel on Telegram called “Yura, Forgive Me!” According to that report, the violations occurred last week, when Artemyev was training at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. He allegedly photographed SpaceX engines and other sensitive tech with his phone.
Crew 12 is the 12th operational astronaut mission that SpaceX will fly to the ISS under a contract with NASA. Space.com reached out to SpaceX and NASA for comment about the Artemyev situation but has not yet heard back.
Artemyev has spent a total of 560 days in space across three long-duration missions to the ISS, which launched in March 2014, March 2018 and March 2022.
That last flight lifted off just a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off a war that continues to this day. In July 2022, Roscosmos posted photos of Artemyev and two of his cosmonaut colleagues on the ISS holding the flags of two Russian-backed separatist territories in Ukraine. NASA and the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) condemned the photo op, stressing that the orbiting lab should not be used as a platform for wartime propaganda.
Crew 12 is scheduled to launch no earlier than Feb. 15. It will send Fedyaev, ESA’s Sophie Adenot and two as-yet-unnamed astronauts to the ISS for a roughly six-month stay.
