A Nasa astronaut was potentially exposed to Covid-19 by a Russian official
- Russian space official died of Covid-19 soon after pre-launch contact with crew headed to the International Space Station
- Internal Nasa emails suggest Russian counterparts were being tight-lipped about official’s death
US-Russian relations have long been strained but an exception to that has always been mutually beneficial joint efforts in space. Or so it seemed.
New internal emails from Nasa, shared with McClatchy and The Miami Herald, suggest the space relationship too has been increasingly strained. The reason: the secrecy surrounding the Covid-19 death of a Russian space official whose pre-launch close contact with a US astronaut potentially exposed the American to the virus.
The emails centre on the shocking mid-April news that one of the top officials in the Russian programme, Evgeniy Mikrin, near the top of the Russian space programme, had contracted the coronavirus. He died soon after the launch of a US astronaut on a Russian spacecraft for six months on the International Space Station orbiting Earth.
Photos from the time show Mikrin and other top Russian space officials standing next to astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts shortly before they boarded their spacecraft in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, to slingshot skyward.
Mikrin's Covid-19 diagnosis was news in Russia. And the emails show, unfortunately, that it was news too to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
