A Russian cosmonaut has been pulled from a slated SpaceX crew bound for the International Space Station after accusations that he photographed the company’s rocket engines and sensitive documents. The man, Oleg Artemyev, is 54 and carries the experience of eight missions, having originally been named to the four‑person Crew‑12 team that was set to launch in February.
According to a Russian news outlet, the Russian Insider, Artemyev allegedly took pictures of SpaceX’s internal paperwork and used his phone to transfer classified data. The claim comes from a separate report posted by a Telegram channel called “Yura, Forgive Me!” that said he was in Hawthorne, California, shooting the images during training sessions at the SpaceX headquarters in late November.
Rocket‑launch expert Georgy Trishkin told Insider that it would seem “very difficult” for anyone of Artemyev’s experience to accidentally violate regulations so dramatically. Trishkin added that a removal two and a half months before launch, without a clear reason, seemed more like a subtle hint than an outright ban.
The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center also removed him from its “crews in training” list. Meanwhile, Roscosmos released a statement saying Artemyev had been “transferred to another job,” omitting any reference to the alleged scandal.
Artemyev’s past includes three trips to the ISS, the most recent of which lasted 561 days between 2021 and 2022. When he and two other Russian cosmonauts arrived at the station that year, they wore yellow and blue suits as a gesture of support for war‑torn Ukraine. The war began half way through their stay. After returning to Earth, Artemyev had an incident in which he accidentally struck a colleague at the training center.
Roscosmos named 44‑year‑old Andrey Fedyaev as Artemyev’s replacement. Fedyaev was lauded as a “Hero of Russia” and logged his first ISS flight in March 2023, nearly ten years after joining the cosmonaut corps.
Crew‑12 is scheduled to launch no earlier than Feb. 15, after which it will spend six months aboard the ISS. Russia’s only crewed launch pad, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, was severely damaged in a rocket failure late last month and is expected to remain out of service for an extended period.
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