Cosmonaut yanked from SpaceX mission after allegedly taking photos of classified materials

A Russian cosmonaut was removed from an upcoming mission to the International Space Station after he allegedly took pictures of a SpaceX rocket’s engines and classified documents, according to reports.

Oleg Artemyev, a 54-year-old cosmonaut with eight space missions under his belt, was supposed to serve on a four-man SpaceX Crew-12 mission team headed to the ISS in February.

Artemyev was ousted from the mission after he allegedly “photographed SpaceX documentation and then ‘used his phone’ to export classified information,” Russian outlet The Insider first reported.

The outlet cited a separate report from a Russian spaceflight Telegram channel called “Yura, Forgive Me!” that claimed Artemyev snapped the sneaky pictures while training at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California in late November.

Georgy Trishkin, a rocket launch analysist, told the outlet that he believes it would be “very difficult” for such “an experienced cosmonaut” to “inadvertently commit such a gross violation.”

“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,” Trishkin added.

The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center also removed Artemyev from its crews in training list.

The Russian Federal Space Agency, better known as Roscosmos, said in a statement that Artemyev was “transferred to another job” and made no mention of the reported scandal.

Artemyev previously completed three missions to the ISS. Most recently, he completed a 561-day rotation stretching from 2021 to 2022.

When he and two other Russian cosmonauts arrived at the ISS in 2022, they donned yellow and blue spacesuits as a show of solidarity with war-torn Ukraine. The Russia-Ukraine war started in the middle of their mission.

Upon his return from the cosmos, Artemyev accidentally ran over a colleague who worked at the cosmonaut training center.

The agency described Artemyev’s replacement, 44-year-old Andrey Fedyaev, as a “Hero of Russia.”

Fedyaev successfully completed his first space mission to the ISS in March 2023 — almost a decade after he first enlisted in the cosmonaut corps, according to the agency.

The Crew-12 mission is set to launch no earlier than Feb. 15 and hunker down for a six-month stay at the ISS.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome, Russia’s only crewed-mission launch site, suffered major damage during a rocket launch in late November and is out of commission for the foreseeable future, according to Roscosmos.