Watch the Soyuz near-disaster – Quartz



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On Oct. 11, an astronaut and a cosmonaut on a mission to the International Space Station had a wild ride when their Soyuz rocket failed.

The Russian Space Agency has released new video showing what happened: One of four detachable boosters carrying the rocket into space.

Roscosmos

The booster on the left fails to separate properly and bangs into Soyuz core.

The rocket managed, amazingly, to get back on the run while moving many times the speed of sound. The loss of velocity following the collision is likely to have been triggered by the escape of space, and the accident triggered emergency systems that contain the space capsule containing the astronauts to safety.

The Russian investigation into the incident, which has been gathered together. Because of the malfunctioning sensor, the separation occurred abnormally.

Russian officials said that the cap on an oxidizer tank failed to open, but did not respond to further questions about what caused the accident, or what the agency will be doing differently ahead of the next crewed launch, scheduled for Dec. 3.

NASA would not comment on the failure. The US space agency has its own team assessing the rocket, and expects to conduct a flight to the public.

The Soyuz has already flown again since the incident, launching a satellite we have a different configuration of the rocket on Oct. 25. The Soyuz will fly twice more before the crew Dec. 3 launch. That return to flight is quite fast compared to recent US launch failures; the loss of an uncrewed Falcon 9th in 2015 kept that rocket on the ground for six months.

Space engineers note that the Soyuz has far more heritage than the Falcon 9, or indeed any other rocket flying today: The original Soyuz design became operational as an intercontinental ballistic missile in 1959, and the current design for crew has flown successfully 64 times since 2000 The engineers behind this vehicle have detailed records of its performance, which allowed them to quickly isolate what went wrong.

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