By Laura McBride
A Russian-designed rocket used to send astronauts into orbit in the ISS experienced a malfunction during a launch on Thursday in Kazakhstan.
A Russian-designed rocket used to send astronauts into orbit in the ISS experienced a malfunction during a launch on Thursday in Kazakhstan.
Tasked with carrying Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and American astronaut Nick Hague to the International Space Station, the Soyuz MS-10 rocket launched from Baikonur cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan at around 9:40am BST on Thursday. However, just 119 seconds into the flight, mission control at NASA began to report of an issue with the booster rocket during the separation of the rocket.
The men inside the capsule of the rocket reported weightlessness, which was a warning sign for mission control. At the pressure and speed the men were at, they should have been feeling pushed back in their seats, so weightlessness is the precise opposite of the expected situation.
As a result of the failure of the booster rocket, the pair were forced to abort the ascent into space, ejecting the capsule and beginning what NASA described as a “ballistic descent”. This subjected the men inside to what former cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko described in Zvezda newspaper as five times the normal force of gravity, and the pair landed around 12 miles east of the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan, approximately 310 miles north-east of the launch site at Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The two have been transported to Moscow to undergo evaluation and treatment, but in the meantime the Russian space agency Roscosmos has announced their safe return. In addition to the update on the men’s health, it has also announced via Twitter the launch of an inquiry into the launch failure and an immediate grounding of all Soyuz capsules. This means that there is no way to move crew between the International Space Station and Earth, as there are no other rockets currently capable of safe space transport - space development rivals Boeing and SpaceX will not ready to take astronauts into space until at least some time in 2019.
This is not the first problem with Soyuz rockets this year - in August, cosmonauts were forced to plug a hole in the Soyuz MS-09 capsule that had docked at the ISS with epoxy sealant after oxygen began leaking out.
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