The only exit from the world to the International Space Station is unsuccessful. And now?

This article was originally published in SpaceNews magazine on October 22, 2018.

Nick Hague thought he knew what to expect when he first flew into space – until the unexpected happened.

"The first two minutes were easy, and that's all I was waiting for," he said in a series of interviews on October 16, five days after that. launch. "It went from" normal "to" something was not going fast enough. "

About two minutes after the launch of the Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome, something went wrong with its Soyuz rocket. The launch abandonment system of the Soyuz MS-10 space shuttle, which was carrying the cosmonaut of The Hague and the Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, immediately released it from the damaged rocket. It happened so fast that Hague was not aware of the booster problem until the spacecraft safely left.

"The first thing I really noticed was being shaken pretty violently, from one side to the other, as this security system kept us away from the rocket," he said. he declared. "Then there was an alarm inside the capsule and a light up there. I knew once I saw this light that we had an emergency with the booster and that at that time, we would not go to orbit that day. "

Hague and Ovchinin turned to their training, including simulations of such abortions, to guide the Soyuz downhill and make a safe landing near the city of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhastan. "We had a smile," recalls Hague. "He reaches out, I shake his hand, then we start making jokes between us about the shortness of our flight."

Investigation and consequences

The implications of the accident, however, do not make people laugh. Roscosmos, the Russian space company, immediately set up a state commission to investigate the accident. Speculation focused on one of the four belt thrusters, which may not have properly separated from the rocket. This could have triggered an engine stop of the second stage, causing an abandonment.

Russian authorities have promised to promptly investigate the accident. Sergei Krikalev, the former cosmonaut who runs the Roscosmos manned space flight program, said one day after the launch's failure that the first results of the investigation could be published as early as 20 October. have suggested that crew launches of Soyuz could resume as early as late November or early December, although Roscosmos has made no official announcement on this subject.

For the moment, however, the only way to send crews to the International Space Station is the ground. "Obviously, it is a high priority for Russia to try to understand what happened," Kenny Todd, ISS Operations Integration Manager, told a news conference on the day. of the accident. "They will put a lot of resources into trying to figure out exactly what happened."

Hague and Ovchinin were to join the three people currently on the station: Commander Alexander Gerst of ESA, Serena Auñón-Chancellor of NASA and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos. The three men, who arrived at the ISS in early June, were to return to Earth in December.

If the Soyuz stays still in December, the three can stay on the ISS a little longer, but not much: the Soyuz probe is only evaluated for about 200 days in the space based testing the ability of its components to manage the spatial environment. . The current Soyuz at the station, Soyuz MS09, would reach this limit by the end of December. "There is a bit of room" on this life, Todd said, "but not a lot of margin."

This poses the risk of what NASA calls the "crew suppression" of the station: the departure of the current crew, leaving the ISS unoccupied for the first time in more than 18 years. This could put the station at risk if a problem arose there without astronauts on board to solve it.

Todd downplayed these concerns. "I am very confident that we could fly for a considerable time" unmanned, he said. "There is no indication that we can not continue to drill holes in the sky and perform a minimum of command. I'm not too worried about that. "

However, he made it clear that leaving the unmanned onboard station was also not advisable. "We are going to look at our options to try to make sure we do not have to dismantle the station," he said.

Another concern is the work that the crew of the station can perform with only three people on board. NASA has postponed two spacewalks planned for the end of October to replace the batteries in the station's electrical system, with Hague being one of the astronauts programmed to run them. Roscosmos also pushed the exit into space in November to inspect the outside of the Soyuz MS-09 module, which leaked in August from a small hole whose cause is being investigated.

A smaller team on the station also means less time for experiments. Prior to the accident, NASA had reported slightly higher than expected use, said Susan Helms, a former astronaut serving on the Aerospace Safety Advisory Committee (ASAP) at a meeting that took place coincidentally the same day as the Soyuz accident.

Future research projects will have to be re-examined, she said, and probably reduced. "It's now a matter of new planning, of course, because it depends on the presence of five crew members and what they would do," she said.

One of the biggest users of the ISS is NanoRacks, the company that provides commercial access to the ISS for internal experiments and satellite launches. "We're relying a lot on the crew," said Mike Lewis, NanoRacks' Chief Technology Officer. "We are very aware that many experiments, as well as those of other payload developers, may need to be re-evaluated."

An asset, he said, is that the company has taken steps to automate many of its payloads. "We have recently done a lot of work on automation and tuning so we can control it from the ground," he said, with about half of the payload that can be driven executed from a control room located in a NanoRacks installation. in Houston.

Concerns of the commercial crew

The Soyuz accident has so disrupted the operations of the ISS that it is the only way to bring people to the station. NASA had once hoped that this would no longer be the case now with Boeing and SpaceX's commercial crewed vehicles. However, the schedules of these vehicles have decreased considerably in recent years.

A week before the accident, NASA released the latest flight test programs of both companies. SpaceX's Crew Dragon is now scheduled to fly unarmed to the station in January, followed by a crew test in June. These dates are two months later than the previous calendar, published two months earlier. The Boeing CST-100 Starliner is scheduled to fly an unmanned test flight in March and a crewed flight in August.

ASAP, at its meeting a few hours after the Soyuz accident, feared that even the new schedules would be unrealistic and that the agency, concerned about a gap in access to the ISS, might try to cut corners and accelerate the development of these vehicles.

"The Committee believes that an overloaded schedule, linked to a real or perceived interruption in the transportation of astronauts to the International Space Station and possibly exacerbated by the events of this morning, raises concerns that strong technical design solutions will be replaced." and that the core content of the program is delayed or deleted, and decisions "good enough to continue" could be made with insufficient data, "said Patricia Sanders, chair of the committee, adding that it is not necessary to There was no evidence to date that NASA is making decisions that are "detrimental to safety".

Commercial crew program managers from both companies, who spoke at the International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight later today, said they could look for ways to accelerate work on their vehicles. if necessary, but that security remained above all else.

"You have to do the same job. You have to do the right job, "said Benji Reed, director of Mission Management Sales Teams at SpaceX. "The question is whether it is possible to compress this program. You do not plan to cut work. "

"We are looking at the situation in terms of:" Could I work in teams or extra staff? "Said John Mulholland, vice president and commercial programs manager of Boeing's space exploration unit." We never thought what you could not do, what you could reduce. "

Ready to fly again

At a news conference in Moscow on October 12, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said he was optimistic that Soyuz would return to his original schedule, avoiding the worst scenarios for the future of Soyuz. ISS.

"I really think we will now fly back on a Russian Soyuz rocket," he said, "and I have no reason to believe at this point that it will not run like planned".

Bridenstine congratulated NASA staff and his Russian counterparts for their work in the aftermath of the accident. "I have so much confidence in this relationship, I have so much confidence in the NASA team," he said.

Hague made similar comments in his interviews. "In terms of whether I have any doubts about the Soyuz, it only reinforced my appreciation of the robustness of this system," he said, thanking the personnel building the Soyuz, and in particular its launch break system.

For now, Hague is back home in Houston with his family and is hoping to get a short-term assignment from NASA's astronaut office soon. No decision was made as to when he might have another chance to go to the station, but Russian officials said he and Ovchinin could fly as early as next spring.

"I have no idea what is waiting for me, but I can say that I am ready to go 100%," he said to the question of whether he wanted to return aboard the ISS by Soyuz.

"I am so grateful to be alive and to be kicking today," he added.