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WRITTEN HISTORY FOR NEWS FROM CBS AND USED WITH AUTHORIZATION
Two minutes after launching onboard a Russian Soyuz rocket last week, NASA astronaut Nick Hague knew that something had gone wrong.
As four boosters come off the main stage of the rocket, he and Soyuz Commander MS-10, Alexey Ovchinin, are thrown violently from one side to the other, then stuck to their seats while that evacuation rockets fire to repel their defective Soyuz booster capsule.
After a brief moment of surprise – this was the first abortion for the Soyuz recall, which is normally reliable, in 35 years – the training began when Ovchinin and Hague began reviewing their checklist for the first time. an emergency return to Earth.
The jolts and rapid acceleration only lasted a few seconds, said Hague, followed by a few moments of weightlessness as the Soyuz probe floated to the top of its abandonment course and was starting to dive back to Earth.
For Hague, who makes his first space flight, the long-awaited goal of finally flying into space was out of range of his cockpit window.
"At one point, we reached the top of our trajectory. I looked out the window and saw the curve of the Earth there and the darkness of the space. It was a very sweet and fleeting moment, knowing that I understood and it would not work, "said Hague in an interview with CBS News.
"What can you do, sometimes you do not get a vote," he said by satellite at Houston's Johnson Space Center, "so this time we're going to fight with the shots and you're just trying to celebrate the little gifts you receive, like walking (our) boys to school this morning.
Hague and Ovchinin exploded Thursday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, to kick off a planned six-hour rendezvous with the International Space Station. The commander of the expedition 57, Alexander Gerst, as well as the NASA flight engineer, Serena Auñón-Chancellor and cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, stood near us to welcome them aboard the laboratory.
The first moments of the climb into space seemed normal, but two minutes after take-off, one of the four fuel-belt thrusters on the first stage of the first stage of the Soyuz FG rocket apparently crashed into the air. central side of the second floor.
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The Soyuz spacecraft placed at the top of the rocket was equipped with various abandonment systems to pull or push the crew safely at any time of the climb into space. A failure in the first minute and 54 seconds would have triggered a phase 1 stop, automatically triggering a rescue rocket on the nose of the Soyuz probe to quickly move the crew away from a faulty booster.
A little less than two minutes after the start of the flight, the rescue tower is dropped and the crew relies on thrusters integrated into their Soyuz spacecraft to push them to safety, a procedure known as the abandonment of phase 1A. This is the procedure that was triggered during the launch last week, establishing a steep "ballistic" trajectory that subjected the crew to 6.7 times the normal force of gravity while its descent module hit the thick low atmosphere.
"On the descent, the G-loads were higher, about seven G going back on our ballistic trajectory," Hague said. "When you get back to normal, you may have four or five Gs, so that's not much more. It was not too uncomfortable to cross these G. Then it was a normal landing.
Haggling and descending under a large parachute, Hague and Ovchinin settled at a touchdown near the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, about 250 miles from the launch site. Russian recovery teams arrived at the scene in a few minutes.
Ovchinin called his wife using the crew's satellite phone, but when Hague tried to reach his wife, Catie, the call was sent to voicemail. At that time, however, the family and friends in Baikonur knew that the crew had landed safely.
The two men were repatriated to the cosmodrome where Hague and his wife kissed each other for a long time on the track. Both are active duty air force officers who met while they were attending the US Air Force Academy.
"I have to tell you that when we finally had a chance to hug each other down the plane, we were a little let down for both of us. The emotions we had retained just to stay focused on the situation, "he said." As for the boys, my youngest, God bless him, he looks at me and he says, 'Dad, when are you going back into the 39; space?
Hague explained that his intensive training on Soyuz and his 20 year career in the air force had prepared him for what was to become a mad rush.
"You know, I think training is the starting point, right? I have spent my career in the air force in very stressful situations and this is not the first urgency in which I have participated in flight, a- he declared.
"You realize that the training is there to protect you. What I can do to help us get on the ground as safely as possible, is to try to stay as calm and focused as possible and do everything I need to do to make sure we succeed. . So, as soon as we saw the booster failure indicator … we started to perform the procedures as we had done dozens of times before (in the simulator) and we tried to d & # 39; be as specific as possible. "
Hague said he "had no idea" when Ovchinin and he might have a second chance to fly into space "but I can say I'm ready to go 100%."
"As for whether I have any doubts about the Soyuz, it only reinforced my appreciation of the robustness of this system," he said. "This system (abortion) has not been tested for 35 years. But we tested it last week and everything is ready. "
The abortion has cast a key in the programmed rotation of the space station crew.
Had Ovchinin and Hague reached the space station as planned, the current laboratory team would have returned to Earth on December 13th. Hague and Ovchinin reportedly had the station for about a week when three new crew members – Oleg Kononenko, Canadian astronaut David Anne McClain, astronaut of Saint James and NASA – had to arrive on board of the Soyuz MS-11 / 57S spacecraft.
In the event that the Russian failure investigation goes to the bottom of the story, space station officials will likely consider advancing the launch of the Kononenko crew until the end of November or early December. At the same time, the crew of the current station in orbit could be extended by a few days or weeks beyond its landing date of 13 December, to allow more time for joint activities.
But the Soyuz spacecraft MS-09 / 55S from Gerst, Auñón-Chancelier and Prokopyev, which transported the trio into space on July 6, was only certified for about 210 days in orbit and must return to Earth January 4th at the latest. But they would almost certainly return home in December.
If this scenario arose, Kononenko, Saint-Jacques and McClain would operate the station themselves until the next scheduled launch of Soyuz in early April. Before the launch, this flight included Oleg Skripochka, NASA astronaut Christina Koch and a guest astronaut from the United Arab Emirates.
The guest astronaut originally planned to return to Earth with Ovchinin and Hague around April 16th. But in the aftermath of this abortion, it's hard to know who will join Skripochka and Koch next April, or even if the crew is in danger of being mixed up.
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