Soyuz failure: NASA astronauts currently have no way to fly into space

Russia’s
Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft launched two crew members on Thursday but
failed in mid-flight.

Reuters

• A Soyuz
  rocket carrying a NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut failed
  in mid-flight on Thursday.
• The two crew members had a rough descent back to Earth,
  but survived without any apparent injury.
• Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency,
  is investigating the Soyuz rocket failure, but it’s unknown how
  long this will take.
• Soyuz is the only human-rated spacecraft available to
  NASA, Europe, Russia, and other
  partners of the International Space Station
  — but it is now grounded indefinitely.
• SpaceX and Boeing are building new commercial ships to reach
  the space station, but they wouldn’t help with the current
  situation.
• Three people living aboard the $100-billion space
  station could even be forced to evacuate the orbiting
  laboratory in January 2019.

An astronaut and cosmonaut survived a harrowing
mid-flight failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket on Thursday
morning.

But human access to space is now on hold indefinitely while
authorities investigate the launch failure.

After NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011 without a
replacement, the US was left without its own
spaceship to fly people to and from the International Space
Station (ISS).

SpaceX and Boeing are building new commercial spaceships for NASA
to ferry astronauts and
cosmonauts to and from the floating laboratory, but those
vehicles aren’t finished. The soonest they might fly people is
mid-2019, and approval for standard crewed missions may not come
until the end of next year.

So for the past seven years, the US, Russia, Europe, Japan, and
others have relied on one, and only one, viable crewed launch
system: the Soyuz, which is now grounded until further notice.

“The Soyuz has been a reliable workhorse we could count on to
safely deliver crews to the ISS,” Wayne Hale — an engineer,
rocket accident investigator, and a former NASA space shuttle
director — told Business Insider in an email.

He added: “Until the cause of this failure can be determined and
corrected this puts our toehold in space at extreme risk.”

That toehold is the space station, which has been occupied by
crew members continuously for nearly 18 years.

A
three-module Soyuz spacecraft.

NASA

The big bright spot, say Hale and other spaceflight experts, is
that Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick
Hague, who were on board the rocket when it failed, actually
survived.

“This isn’t a surprise to astronauts. All machines fail
eventually. The real question is, are you ready for your machine
to fail or not?” Chris Hadfield, a retired astronaut who’s flown
the Soyuz to space, said in a live
Periscope broadcast on Thursday morning.

Hadfield, who last flew aboard a Soyuz in 2013, added: “The
beauty is it shows everything worked. The crew’s fine. The crew
didn’t get hurt. All the systems that were there in case of a
rocket failure worked. It’s not what you want to happen, but it
happens.”

What went wrong during the Russian rocket launch

The
Soyuz MS-10 rocket is rolled out by train to the launch pad,
Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2018 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan.

Bill
Ingalls/NASA

On Thursday morning, Ovchinin and Hague stuffed themselves into a
tiny space capsule atop a 150-foot-tall rocket.

The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft system, as the rocket and capsule is
called, lifted off from a launch pad in Kazakhstan around 4:40
a.m. EDT and zoomed toward space.

But about two minutes after liftoff, when the rocket was mostly
out of sight from the ground, a second-stage booster on the rocket failed as four
large side boosters were being jettisoned.

That’s when an “ABORT” light appeared in the cabin and, about a
second later, the system automatically ejected the capsule, Kenny
Todd, the space station’s Mission Operations Integration Manager,
said during a press briefing on Thursday.

Todd couldn’t say whether the second-stage rocket exploded or
simply lost thrust, but estimated the crew ejected about 30 miles
above Earth, which is halfway to
the edge of space.

“The automated systems kicked in. The system knew the rocket
wasn’t providing the acceleration it was supposed to, so it
ejected or deployed the Soyuz off the top,” Hadfield said. “The
little capsule came tumbling down, got itself pointed the right
way, deployed its parachute, and lowered the crew down to the
ground.”

Expedition
57 crew members Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos (left) and Nick
Hague of NASA (right).

Victor
Zelentsov/NASA

During the first leg part of its 34-minute journey back to Earth,
the capsule entered what’s called a ballistic descent —
essentially the equivalent of falling out of the sky like a stone
thrown into the air.

This is risky because the capsule isn’t on a path to best use
Earth’s atmosphere to gradually slow down.

“If you’re ballistic, you’re just falling. When the air gets
thick, it’s sort of like hitting water, and you get squished up
to 8G or more,” Hadfield said, referring to a force eight times
the strength of Earth’s gravity at the surface. “It’s a safe but
much more rugged way to enter.”

The crew was weightless for a moment, but their rigorous training
had prepared them for a worst-case scenario like this. That hard
work leading up to the launch is why Hadfield thinks the crew
probably felt more disappointed than scared.

“Their main reaction would have been one of frustration, and
probably anger, because they’ve been training a long time to get
ready for this launch, and to have the rocket fail means they’re
not going to space today,” Hadfield said. “The good news is that
they’re safe.”

Reid Wiseman, a NASA astronaut who works on the ISS program, said
during Thursday’s press briefing that his “heart was beating
hard” when he saw the abort.

“‘I hope they get down safe.’ That was the only thing going
through my mind,” Wiseman said.

Roscosmos is looking into the failure that led to aborting the
mission. Some Russian media outlets are even reporting that a
criminal investigation has been launched, perhaps in light of

drill holes recently discovered on a Soyuz spacecraft docked
to the ISS.

A
view of the Soyuz MS-10 failure from space on October 11,
2018.

Alexander
Gerst/ESA/NASA via Flickr

German astronaut Alexander Gerst was photographing the launch
from aboard the ISS when the Soyuz failure occurred. He managed
to capture a view of the capsule as it ejected from the rocket.

“Glad our friends are fine,” Gerst, who is the ISS commander,
said in a tweet after the launch.
“Today showed again what an amazing vehicle the Soyuz is, to be
able to save the crew from such a failure. Spaceflight is hard.
And we must keep trying for the benefit of humankind.”

Gerst is currently living aboard the space station with NASA
astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor and cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev,
and the plan for the crew is now uncertain.

What will happen to the 3 people on board the space station?

The International Space
Station.
NASA

No one is certain exactly what the plan is yet for
Auñón-Chancellor, Gerst, and Prokopyev, who were scheduled to
return to Earth in December.

“It could be many months,” Hadfield said. “They’re basically
marooned there, indefinitely at this point, until we can get
another vehicle that can get up there.”

This is only true in terms of keeping the ISS staffed. The crew
does have another Soyuz spacecraft attached to the space station,
and they can board it to evacuate — either in an emergency or at
the direction of mission control.

But that Soyuz “lifeboat” spacecraft only has a roughly 200-day
shelf life in space.

“There’s a little bit of margin on the other side of that, but
not a lot of margin,” Todd said.

Since the Soyuz lifeboat arrived in June, this means the crew
might be forced to evacuate in January, Todd said. This is more
likely to happen if a Soyuz that’s scheduled for launch in
December doesn’t fly as planned. (The next Soyuz flight after
that is currently scheduled for April.)

For its part, NASA and its partners want to keep the crew on
board the space station as long as possible.

“We need to think about the long-term plan for the health of the
crew on the space station, and the health of the space station
itself. If you abandon the space station, then there’s no one
there to fix things as they fail, and it’ll eventually have a
serious problem,” Hadfield said. “So my expectation will be that
they will prolong the time for the crew on the space station for
as long as feasible.”

ESA
astronaut Alexander Gerst.

ESA/NASA

Wiseman said he spoke to the crew Thursday morning and that
they’re prepared for whatever comes next.

“They’re ready to serve at the will of the program,” Wiseman said
during the press briefing. “They will stay up there as long as
they are needed to.”

Wiseman and Todd said the ISS has plenty of supplies, with more
on the way from cargo ships like SpaceX’s Dragon.

But if it comes to it, they said it can be fully evacuated and
operated remotely for some time, especially given several
redundant systems.

“We could tolerate some significant failures and continue to
operate,” Todd said, though science experiments that crew members
run aboard the station would be affected.

Why can’t Boeing and SpaceX step in to help?

Nine
astronauts will fly the first four crewed missions inside Boeing
and SpaceX’s new spaceships for NASA, called the CST-100
Starliner (left) and Crew Dragon (right).

NASA
via AP

Although SpaceX’s
Crew Dragon and Boeing’s
CST-100 Starliner spacecraft are nearing completion as part
of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, they’re not yet ready for
primetime. The earliest NASA is willing to test-launch either
ship with astronauts on board is a very fuzzy mid-2019.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement on
Thursday that “a thorough investigation into the cause of the
incident will be conducted.” But Roscosmos didn’t provide an
estimate on how long a Soyuz-failure commission will take to
conclude its work.

Equally uncertain is what fixes might need to be made to Soyuz —
and Russia’s Progress cargo spaceships, which use the same rocket
system — and how long those alterations might take.

If the Soyuz failure takes months to ascertain and fix, though,
it could actually end up further delaying SpaceX and Boeing’s
first crewed test-launches.

That’s because NASA requires a crew on the space station in case
anything goes wrong with docking operations of the Crew Dragon or
Starliner.

“The space station is a $100-billion asset to the world,” Todd
said. “Having a crew on board and being able to monitor these
crews as they approach, it’s certainly important.”

In any case, Hadfield said this is not the end of Russia or
NASA’s space programs.

“If your car has an engine failure, are you never going to drive
a car again? Of course you are,” Hadfield said.

John Logsdon, a space policy expert, author, and spaceflight
historian at George Washington University’s Space Policy
Institute, says he is not surprised by the pickle that NASA and
its partners are now in.

“We conducted an unstable space policy, in terms of space
transportation. In retrospect, you could argue we retired the
shuttle prematurely. In retrospect, you can argue Congress didn’t
not provide adequate funding to Commercial Crew in its early
years, and that’s delayed it by two to three years,” Logsdon
said. “You can’t live life backwards, but we’re kind of paying
the price for less-than-stellar decisions.”