Soyuz rocket launch failure with an astronaut on board caught on video

A
video screenshot showing the Soyuz MS-10 rocket launch failure on
October 12, 2018.

Roscosmos
(via Twitter)

• A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying two people
  
  failed in mid-flight on October 12.
• The crew — NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian
  cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin — had their space capsule
  ejected from the rocket and survived without
  injury.
• Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, posted a video of the
  botched launch to Twitter on Thursday.

Almost three weeks ago, a Soyuz rocket carrying a NASA astronaut
and a Russian cosmonaut failed in mid-flight, 31 miles above
Earth’s surface. The space capsule carrying the two
men ripped away from the damaged rocket, then
plunged back to Earth.

Thankfully, the two men onboard — Alexey Ovchinin and Nick
Hague — survived without injury and landed on the ground in
Kazakhstan.

“We knew that if we wanted to be successful, we needed to
stay calm and we needed to execute the procedures in front of us
as smoothly and efficiently as we could,” Hague
told The Associated Press.

After investigating the incident, Russia’s space agency,
Roscosmos, determined that one of the rocket’s boosters failed
and remained stuck to the main rocket body instead of
peeling off. That failure was filmed from a camera attached to
the rocket, which looked down its body.

About 84 seconds into the video, you can see one of the side
boosters stick to the rocket, sending it careening back to the
ground because it was too heavy.

Roscosmos has said a faulty sensor caused the
failure and believes Soyuz rockets will resume launching in
December (when the current three-person space station crew must
return to Earth).

But the failure is worrisome, since Soyuz is the only human-rated
spacecraft currently used to get people to and from the International Space Station.
It’s relied upon by NASA, Europe, Russia, and other partners.

SpaceX and Boeing are building new commercial spaceships to reach
the space station, but they may not launch until mid-2019.

Watch the video of the rocket failure below.