"Roscosmos" has managed to solve the problem by installing a spare service cabin found in the warehouses.
In November 2025, during the launch of a Russian rocket from Baikonur to the ISS, the service cabin of the 8U216 fell from a significant height. Since in the 2010s, due to budget cuts, we abandoned the duplication of launch pads, this created a situation of temporary impossibility for crewed flights. Now, just three months after the incident, "Roscosmos" has managed to solve the problem by installing a spare service cabin found in the warehouses of the Ministry of Defense. The spring launches to the ISS, previously planned, now have a chance to proceed on schedule.
The installation work for the new cabin (produced during the Soviet era but installed for the first time) was carried out by more than 150 employees of the Ground Space Infrastructure Operations Center (AO "TsENKI") and contracting organizations. The cabin weighs 144 tons and has large dimensions. The complexity of the work was increased by the fact that originally, during the construction of the launch pad, the cabin was installed before the installation of the fire opening for the rocket (which is located above the cabin). Now, to rectify the situation more quickly, the spare cabin was installed without dismantling the fire opening. This required the creation of a special and previously unused installation method through this opening.
To understand the complexity of the task, it is worth considering that the beams of the cabin are 19 meters long and weigh about 17 tons each. That is, they are larger than the diameter of the fire opening, and simply lowering them through it (not at an angle) would not have worked. Therefore, for different parts of the beams, lifting slings of different lengths and, accordingly, with different loads were used.
The spare cabin itself arrived at Baikonur just over two months ago. After that, 2,350 square meters of structures were prepared and painted, and all fastening units were replaced. In addition, the electrical equipment of the cabin was replaced and debugged, and more than 250 meters of welds were completed.
The head of "Roscosmos", Dmitry Bakhanov, noted: "Starting tomorrow, we begin preparations for the launch of the Progress cargo spacecraft, scheduled for March 22." This means that the previously scheduled timelines for flights to the ISS did not have to be shifted again. The work appears to be a significant success, as previously most observers estimated the timeline for correcting the issues with the service cabin to be many months, often mentioning timelines of one to two years.
The significance of what happened is hard to overestimate. The Vostochny Cosmodrome is not yet suitable for crewed flights, so launch pad No. 31 at Baikonur was and remains the only place for Russian crewed flights. Any serious incident here blocks such flights until the situation is rectified.
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