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Rocket failure forces astronauts to make emergency landing Rocket failure forces astronauts to make emergency landing
(about 2 hours later)
A booster rocket carrying a Soyuz spacecraft with a Russian and a US astronaut onboard headed for the international space station failed in mid-air on Thursday, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing. A Russian-American space crew have been forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan after their Soyuz rocket suffered a failure shortly after launching from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in one of the most serious space incidents in recent years.
The rocket was carrying US astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin. Footage from inside the Soyuz showed the two men being shaken around at the moment the failure occurred, with their arms and legs flailing. The launch began as a routine affair. Missions bound for the International Space Station (ISS) have been conducted every few months for the past 20 years. But 119 seconds into Thursday’s flight, mission controllers on the Nasa broadcast began to speak of a failure.
The rocket was launched from the Soviet-era cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. A Reuters reporter who observed the launch from around half a mile away said it had gone smoothly in its initial stages and that the failure of the booster rockets must have occurred at higher altitude. Shaky footage from the capsule’s cabin seen during the live broadcast appeared to show objects floating mid-launch. The crew also notified mission control that they felt weightlessness, an indication of a problem during this stage of the flight.
Russian news agencies reported that the crew had safely made an emergency landing and were in radio contact and that rescuers were on the way to pick them up. Agitated voices flooded the radio link between mission control and the capsule, which could be heard on the Nasa broadcast. Details and the exact sequence of events remain unclear, but shortly after the crew initiated an abort and ejected their capsule from the rocket.
“Search and rescue teams are in the air and heading towards the expected touchdown location for the Soyuz spacecraft returning to Earth carrying two crew members,” Nasa said in a statement. Judging by the time at which the failure took place, it involved separation of the rocket’s second stage – just before the ship would have ignited its third stage for its final kick to exit the atmosphere.
A commentator on Nasa’s live broadcast later said that rescue teams had reached the capsule’s landing site and the crew were in a “good condition”. The crew, the Russian Alexey Ovchinin and the American Nick Hague, had already exited their capsule when rescue teams arrived.
Nasa described the emergency abort as a “ballistic landing”, meaning that the crew’s spaceship did not achieve the speed necessary to achieve orbit around the Earth and instead fell back to the ground.
Russia’s space programme has experienced an embarrassing string of launch failures since 2010, when serious quality control and other systemic issues became apparent. But this marks the first time in the history of the ISS programme that a manned Soyuz mission has failed.
What happens next will have significant repercussions for the ISS programme and the US-Russia space partnership in general. Standard practice is to ground a rocket after failure until the cause is identified and addressed.
Soyuz is currently the only rocket capable of sending astronauts to the space station, and US companies like Boeing and SpaceX will be unlikely to be ready to take astronauts into space until sometime next year.
A former Russian cosmonaut, Mikhail Kornienko, was quoted by the Russian news outlet as saying the crew probably experienced intense forces up to five times that of normal Earth gravity. Typical reentry is about four times that force.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos is forming a committee to investigate the incident but will hold no press conference on Thursday. Nasa has continued with rolling coverage on its web channel but is dependent on information from Moscow.
SpaceSpace
Nasa
KazakhstanKazakhstan
International Space Station
South and Central AsiaSouth and Central Asia
RussiaRussia
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