The moment NASA has dreaded for eight years has finally arrived. The moment the Roscosmos denied was ever a possibility has come.
A Russian Soyuz rocket headed to the ISS and carry U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency abort as the booster meant to take them to space failed. The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft detached from the rocket and parachuted to the ground. Both are alive.
This was a ballistic abort. It is the second time it's ever happened in human space flight (the last time being in 1983, also to a Soyuz)
You can watch a video of it happening here, starting at about 2:00. The CG it cuts to is pre-planned in space simulation to show viewers what (under the mission plan) the launch would look like once the rocket is out of view. THe video cuts several times to the capsule falling back to earth in it's abort mode.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.2969adf62901
This is a (sort of) diagram of what you're seeing:
The Soyuz space vehicle (and capsule) is part of an upper stage inside of a payload shroud. On top of the payload shroud, like all manned vertical rockets, is a
launch escape system. If you ever wondered what the point at the top of a rocket is, it's that. For reference, this is the launch escape system of the Apollo capsule undergoing a test:
It's basically a solid fueled rocket that very quickly pulls the capsule away from the rest of the rocket.
Because the Soyuz capsule is in a shroud, the capsule itself is dropped out of the bottom of the upper stage once it is pulled away from the booster below, and a parachute opens.
I'm not sure what the maximum operating altitude for Soyuz are, but for NASA's Orion capsule, which is significantly larger, it operates up to 300,000 feet (91 kilometers). After that point, the LAS seperates and if an abort is required, the actual upper stage engines would be needed to make a sub-orbital abort. If an abort is required even later, the spacecraft would make one initial orbit (the orbital profile would not be the planned one, but an abort orbit) then begin it's descent sequence.
I'm going to commentate on this, because I raised this issue as a growing risk literally a week ago. I will repost what I wrote. It applies here:American, Russian alive after Soyuz rocket headed to space station fails on launch
By Anton Troianovski October 11 at 6:42 AM
MOSCOW — A Russian rocket carrying an American and a Russian to the International Space Station failed on launch Thursday, forcing the astronaut and cosmonaut to careen back to Earth in a dramatic emergency landing.
U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin parachuted to the ground safely in their capsule after a booster on the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft failed, NASA and Russia’s space agency said. They were met by rescue teams in remote Kazakhstan more than 200 miles from their launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
It was the first time that the Soyuz — the main workhorse of manned space flight today — had failed on a launch to the 20-year-old International Space Station. The spacecraft has been the sole means of bringing humans to the space station since the end of the U.S. Space Shuttle program, but commercial providers aiming for manned spaceflight are increasingly nipping at Russia’s heels.
Search-and-rescue forces “reached the landing site and the crew is actually out of the capsule,” a NASA spokeswoman in Houston said on the space agency’s live video broadcast as the emergency operation unfolded. “From here, the teams will be working to get them ready to return to Moscow.”
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, put it more bluntly in his daily conference call with journalists: “Thank God everyone is alive.”
After the booster failed, Ovchinin and Hague were forced to make a ballistic descent, coming back to the ground at a sharper angle than normal and causing higher gravitational forces on their bodies. But soon after the landing, U.S. and Russian officials said that rescue forces were in contact with the astronaut and cosmonaut.
Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin said he was forming a state commission to investigate what caused the failure.
The rare failed launch of the Soyuz rocket is the latest and most grave problem to beset U.S.-Russian cooperation in space. Last month, an oxygen leak was found in the International Space Station that Rogozin said was caused deliberately. Its cause still hasn’t been determined. Russian officials have also insisted on a bigger role in a U.S.-led plan to build a space station orbiting the moon.
Nevertheless, officials in both countries continue to refer to space flight as a rare example of U.S.-Russian cooperation continuing despite geopolitical tensions.
“I strongly believe we’re going to get the right answer to what caused the hole on the International Space Station and that together we’ll be able to continue our strong collaboration,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on a visit to Moscow this week, according to the Associated Press. “What we’ve got to do is we’ve got to very dispassionately allow the investigation to go forward without speculation, without rumor, without innuendo, without conspiracy.”
And most ominously...
I will repeat.
This was dismissed here, last week, by the usual suspects, who of course were talking out of their ass, as Russophobia or much ado about nothing. Well no, it wasn't. It was very real. NASA has been worried about it for years, and now it has happened.
So what now?
Well the SpaceX Dragon 2 is headed to the ISS with a crew of two NASA Astronauts in June 2019. It will launch on the world's leading rocket, the Falcon 9.
Shortly after, under the same commercial crew contract, Boeing will launch two NASA astraunts to the ISS in August 2019 via their own CST-100 Starliner, on the first man-rated Atlas V.
[img]https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/djr7hbsuwae8s81-1533311411.jpg?resize=480:*[/img]
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/10/0...ted-this-year/
Both are significiantly larger and more capable than the Soyuz Capsule and rocket. Both cna carry a crew of 7.
The flight hardware of both space vehicles is in final construction.
Basically, as outrageous as it is for this to happen, it couldn't have happened at a better time. The US and ESA are about to have two superior and cheaper options to the Soyuz to get to our space station, thus ending our long, painful overpriced, and now unacceptably risky dependence on Russian soyuz flights. After the 2019 test flights, crews should be able to fly to the ISS four to six times per year... a far higher launch rate than the Soyuz. Both the Dragon and CST-100 can be used for a minimum of 10 flights.
This has to be the end of US flight son Soyuzes. No more should be paid for or flown. NASA astronauts (and ESA hopefully) should now only fly on American hardware from American launch sites as Russia, despite YEARS of denial about the growing problem of their industrial base, has failed to solve something that has cropped up on failures of Progress (basically Cargo Soyuzes) and Proton rocket launches over the past 8 years.
This must also be the beginning of the end US-Russian space cooperation. They can't afford and do not have the technology to go where the US and ESA are going, and their space program's leadership's ineptitude and propagandizing of how everything is okay behind the scenes... "nothing to see here folks!"... nearly got an American killed after years of near misses of rockets that are a cousin to this one.
The Russian Federation inherited a world-class space program from the Soviet Union. Like so much under the Putin dictatorship, it has been strip-mined by Russia's Putin-oligarchs for all it is worth and now that inheritance is depleted.
No more Americans on Russian Space craft, period. They said they would fix their shit, and they didn't. No more chances.