NASA chief says agency plans to launch crew on Soyuz in December

Enlarge / The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft is seen in this false-color infrared image as it launched with Expedition 57 Flight Engineer Nick Hague of NASA and Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, on Thursday, October 11, 2018. (credit: NASA)
Less than two weeks ago, a Soyuz rocket took off with a Russian cosmonaut and a NASA astronaut riding in a Soyuz capsule. The launch proceeded normally for about two minutes until the rocket experienced a problem, and one of the Soyuz's emergency escape systems fired automatically and pulled the crew vehicle away from the booster. After a few seconds of rapid acceleration, the crew capsule carrying Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague made a relatively normal, safe return to Earth.

In the wake of the accident, NASA officials expressed confidence in the ability of the Russian space agency to identify the problem with the Soyuz rocket and implement a fix. 'It's my speculation that they will put a lot of resources into trying to understand exactly what happened,' Kenny Todd, the International Space Station's mission operations integration manager, said at the time. 'I would anticipate that they would try to do that sooner rather than later.'
Russian officials have said that they intend to complete their investigation of the Soyuz failure by the end of October, and their report will include recommendations on how to fix the problem. Anonymous sources quoted in Russian media say the problem occurred because one of the Soyuz rocket's side-mounted boosters was improperly attached to the rocket core. This booster struck the core when it was supposed to fall away during launch, triggering a launch abort.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments