Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko shared plans to make the first stratospheric jump to the South Pole in history in 2025-2026. A year earlier, on Cosmonautics Day, April 12, 2024, he and a group of comrades made a similar jump in the Arctic region. Now Antarctica is "in sight".
The logical continuation is to do the same, but from the other side of the planet. It is unlikely that we will be able to get exactly to the geographic pole, because the American Amundsen-Scott station is located there, but we plan to jump to our Vostok station with tricolor parachutes to draw attention to our presence in Antarctica.
Mikhail Kornienko has extensive experience - two space flights in 2010 and in 2015-2016, a total of 516 days 10 hours spent in orbit, and two spacewalks.
A full-fledged stratospheric jump is planned to be carried out either next winter - Antarctic summer, or in a year. A training jump from a height of 6 km to the Russian Progress base on the coast of Antarctica is scheduled for the coming days.
The new expedition requires careful preparation, including in terms of logistics and finance. Thus, costs will increase many times over due to the remoteness of the southern continent.
Everything is much more complicated and much more expensive here - five to seven times for sure. Imagine how much fuel it takes to drive an Il-76 four-engine aircraft with all the equipment to Antarctica. Refueling is also required, and fuel there costs 10 times more than on more familiar continents.
Also, in addition to the jump, the stratonaut plans to perform applied tasks - testing the equipment of the Cospas-Sarsat search and rescue system at the request of colleagues from the Research Institute of Space Instrumentation and other equipment in extreme temperatures.
Read more materials:
- Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko was the first in the world to jump from the stratosphere with a parachute to the North Pole
- Included in the Russian Book of Records: Rostec's Tandem-400 parachute system helped set a world record
- Roscosmos will start selling spacesuits with autographs of cosmonauts to support students and schoolchildren