The Russian Soyuz rocket that launches astronauts to the International Space Station will be grounded for months after two crew members were forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan.
American Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin from Russia were aboard the Soyuz rocket when it developed a thruster problem nearly two minutes after takeoff and were forced to make an emergency landing in their capsule. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced an immediate investigation into the incident.
Video footage beamed live from the Soyuz capsule showed the astronauts being shaken around as they blasted free of the rocket. The emergency abort, which subjected them to gravity nearly seven times stronger than that of Earth, sent them plummeting towards the ground in what is known as a “ballistic landing”. The capsule came down hard, its descent slowed by parachutes, more than 250 miles away from the launch site, near the city of Jezkazgan.
The rocket took off under clear blue skies from the Baikonur cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan and appeared to be functioning perfectly. Hague was on his first flight into space, Ovchinin was on his second.
Four strap-on boosters that surround the Soyuz core thruster were jettisoned as planned, but seconds later – with the rocket travelling at more than 1,100mph – the abort mechanism fired.
Moments before the capsule blasted free of the rocket, Ovchinin was heard telling ground staff: “An accident with the booster, 2 minutes, 45 seconds. That was a quick flight.”
Search and rescue teams are held on standby at Baikonur in case of such in-flight failures. A team dispatched in a helicopter found the two men safe and well and transported them to the local airport where they were flown back to Baikonur aboard a Nasa plane for medical checks.
The incident, the most serious in the history of the International Space Station, has cast a shadow over an otherwise enviable safety record for the Soyuz rocket.
The only previous time crew have had to abort mid-flight was in 1975 when the second and third stages of a Soyuz rocket failed to separate, triggering the automated abort system.
The inquiry, referred to by Russia’s investigative committee as a criminal investigation, comes mere weeks after Roscosmos was forced to launch an investigation into how a hole came to be drilled into the wall of the Soyuz capsule that is now docked at the space station.
Thomas Reiter, a veteran of the space station and adviser to the director general at the European Space Agency, said that Soyuz would now be grounded until the investigation had identified the cause of the failure and rectified it. “How long it will take to get flying again is hard to predict,” he said. But he added that recent investigations into failures of satellite launches have taken on average two months to resolve.
“Now a big replanning process will be initiated,” Reiter said. While the three crew members have plenty of food water and oxygen, the grounding of the Russian rocket will inevitably mean a major overhaul of the astronauts’ priorities. Most of their time is currently spent on scientific experiments, but may now have to be shifted towards maintaining the space station. “They’ll have to look at prioritisation of maintenance tasks,” Reiter added.
Supplies can still be sent to the space station onboard a SpaceX capsule. If an emergency situation develops on the station, the crew can return on the Soyuz capsule docked there. “They still have their life raft,” said Reiter.
“For all of us the most important aspect is that the crew has landed safely and everything is good. That’s a big relief for all of us and the crew up there,” said Reiter.
Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester and a former president of the Royal Astronomical Society, said the Soyuz failure was a shock because of its otherwise impressive safety record. “They will certainly have to review what went wrong before they think about launching anyone again. It depends on how serious the problem is but it could be months before they are ready to fly again. There’s a lot of work to do.
“The downside is there’s currently an unknown anomaly they will have to investigate and understand. And until they’ve done that and determined why it went wrong – was it a component, for example – they cannot fly. They will have to look at all the systems affected and revalidate them. They have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”