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Russian investigators believe that a malfunction would have occurred when separating the first four liquid-propelled propellants from the Soyuz rocket two minutes after take-off from Kazakhstan, which would have led to an emergency landing. A crew of two men heading for the International Space Station, officials said Friday.
Veteran cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who is in charge of the Russian Space Agency's manned space flights program, told reporters that the investigation into Thursday's failed launch was reduced by the collision between part of the first leg of the Soyuz rocket and the second stage of the launcher.
Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague were taken out of the rocket by an emergency evacuation system. They landed safely inside their descent module near Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, about 400 km northeast of the Baikonur cosmodrome. original launch.
The Soyuz first stage includes four boosters, each powered by a kerosene-powered four-kerosene main engine RD-107A, which lasts 1 minute, 58 seconds, at launch. Once their engines are shut off, propellers are expected to drop simultaneously at an altitude of approximately 45,000 feet (45,000 feet) to return to Earth.
Krikalev said Friday that one of the boosters did not separate properly from the main phase of Soyuz.
"There was a collision with one of the side sections, which is part of the first leg. During the separation, the first and second floors came into contact, "Krikalev said, according to a report by ABC News.
The boosters have a push-button system that removes spent rocket segments from the Soyuz core, which had to continue firing to send Ovchinin and Hague into orbit in pursuit of the International Space Station.
The collision damaged the lower part of the main stage of the Soyuz rocket, which prompted the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft to automatically trigger an abandonment. The rocket boosters located outside the hood of the Soyuz capsule, above the nose of the rocket, quickly pushed back the crew of the launcher, which seemed to disintegrate into video recordings taken at the Baikonur cosmodrome.
The failure occurred a few seconds after the needle-shaped launch stop tower was dropped from the rocket as part of the normal Soyuz launch sequence, leaving the rocket engines located on the hull of the spacecraft lead the crew to safety.
Images captured by NASA photographer Bill Ingalls from the Baikonur launch pad seemed to show that only three of the four first-stage boosters were falling from the Soyuz rocket. Moments later, a cloud of steam and debris appeared.
Thursday's emergency landing was the first flight abortion to launch a Soyuz crew since 1975. Another Russian crew was using the abortion system to escape a rocket explosion on the Baikonur launch pad. 1983.
While Russian satellite launches and replenishment missions of the space station have failed in recent years, Soyuz's crew launches went smoothly until Thursday's flight.
Krikalev said investigators are still studying the cause of the dysfunctional separation Thursday, and that the results of the Russian state commission investigation are expected after October 20.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced Friday in a statement that ground crews would "speed up" the preparation of a new Soyuz rocket "in order to decide as soon as possible on the schedule of upcoming launches."
The video below shows the four recalls separating from a Soyuz rocket during a previous launch, including the view of an onboard camera.
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Before Thursday's launching accident, a Soyuz rocket was due to take off from Baikonur on October 31 with an unmanned cargo for refueling and refueling for the space station. The crew of the next space station was to be launched on December 20 on a Soyuz rocket.
The launch dates of these missions are now uncertain, and Russian officials have said that the crew launches of the station would be suspended until the investigation reveals the cause of Thursday's failure. .
A crew of three remains aboard the space station, under the direction of Commander of the Expedition 57, Alexander Gerst – a German astronaut representing the European Space Agency – who lives in the research complex in orbit alongside Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer NASA Serena Auñón-Chancellor.
The Gerst crew launched on June 6 aboard the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft and was scheduled to return to Earth on December 13, leaving Ovchinin and Hague on the station until the launch of cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, astronaut Anne McClain of NASA and Canadian astronaut David Saint. Jacques on the Soyuz MS-11 capsule on December 20th.
The Soyuz MS-09 satellite piloted by Gerst, Prokopyev and Auñón-Chancellor has a nominal life of about 200 days. The expected departure and return of the vehicle could be delayed from mid-December to early January.
Russia also has the possibility to send a Soyuz spacecraft to the unmanned space station later in the year, in a fully automated mode that Russian engineers had already planned to use for a test flight the year before. next. This would allow Gerst and his teammates to stay aboard the station a few months until 2019, while having a Soyuz certified landing craft to bring them home.
Kenny Todd, head of NASA's space station operations integration, said at a press conference on Thursday that officials will assess the state of play of the NASA's space station. 39; Russian investigation on the failure of the launch before any decision regarding future missions, or to determine whether the station will have to be left temporarily unmanned.
"We'll have to let that play a little," Todd said. "The good news is that we have a track to allow the Russians to do this initial work to see if they can not reduce it fast enough, but if it is not, we, in As a program, let's look at what our options are to make sure we do not need to detach the team. "
In the worst case scenario, Todd is confident that the space station could operate safely for a "considerable time" without crew on board.
"The systems are well designed, if they can continue to run and the pumps are doing their job and … the bays keep spinning, and we can keep the batteries charged, yeah, nothing says we can not continue to ( orbit) and do a minimum of command, "said Todd. "It does not bother me so much as our systems continue to operate at their current level.
"And we have good redundancy in these systems," he added. "Thus, even in this case, we can tolerate significant failures and continue to operate the station in a degraded manner."
Crew transport is one of the areas in which the space station is not redundant. The Russian Soyuz capsules are the only vehicles in service capable of transporting crews to and from the space station.
NASA officials hope this will change next year, when the commercial capsules built by Boeing and SpaceX will fly test flights – the first without an astronaut, then a crewed demonstration mission – before starting. Regular crew rotation launches at a rate of two to three missions per year.
But the start of commercial crew services has been delayed, and NASA recently announced that no capsule would be ready for an initial unmanned orbital test flight by the end of the year. The first test flight with astronauts is scheduled for the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in June 2019. The Boeing CST-100 Starliner is scheduled to conduct its first demonstration mission with a crew of three in August.
These schedules remain ambitious, according to a group of NASA security advisers, who said Thursday that the two companies had to solve several technical problems, including parachute problems, before conducting a crew test flight. .
If Thursday's launch went as planned, Ovchinin and Hague intended to remain in orbit until April for a six-month space station expedition. Dmitry Rogozin, the Roscosmos chief, tweeted Friday that officials were planning to launch the two-man team for another mission in the spring of 2019.
Since space station crews had already been assigned to missions in 2019, it was therefore difficult to know how the expedition missions could be modified if Ovchinin and The Hague were to be launched next year.
Thursday's launch was to be the start of Ovchinin's second space trip and the first in The Hague.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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