I certainly wasn’t expecting to wake up to this bit of news, but it’s a statistical probability – this morning Soyuz MS-10 launch ended about 2 minutes into flight with an abort after some kind of anomaly with the Soyuz booster. As of right now, the news is spotty, but the good news is the 2 person crew, Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA Nick Hague, are indeed safe after the failure of the booster and the abort.
Footage of the launch shows an issue at about the 2-minute mark – the live feed from the Soyuz vehicle cuts after a rather violent looking cutoff of the 1st stage engines and loops the last half second or so of footage. Following that the footage I’ve seen shows a very irregular look to what is typically 1st stage separation – the release of the 4 outer boosters of the Soyuz vehicle – which has more of the appearance of an exploding booster than anything else someone familiar with a Soyuz launch would expect.
Communication with the crew was lost during this event, with some reports I’m seeing saying the crew “felt weightless” just as the anomaly occurred. That feeling is natural in a free fall situation which if for whatever reason the booster failed higher up in flight would be the end result of a non-explosive breakup which does match what I saw in the footage.
…And another look at #SoyuzMS10 around the time of a likely accident this morning: https://t.co/vgcPpF7XUw pic.twitter.com/anm0XgEcsw
— Anatoly Zak (@RussianSpaceWeb) October 11, 2018
Of course, it’s far too early to even begin speculating on what actually happened – given probability this could easily be nothing more than the law of averages playing against the number of Soyuz booster launches (of all types) in a given year. There’s always a chance of some kind of failure. However, given both the tense political climate right now and the odd drill hole which was found in the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft the other month will naturally make many wonders if there is some kind of sabotage going on.
I’m not going to speculate on such – I follow Occam’s Razor on all things of this nature which states that the most simple explanation is probably the most likely. In this case, it’s more likely than anything else that the booster simply had some kind of normally possible issue happen and this was the result. Ideas of intentional actions being taken against the vehicle are certainly not improbable but are simply not as likely unless valid evidence is presented which points to such as being more likely. Pure speculation does not meet that criterion.
I will say it is odd that the hole in Soyuz MS-09 and this issue with the Soyuz MS-10 launch happening just months before the beginning of commercial crew launches from the United States to the ISS is concerning, but again, I’m not going to claim sabotage on either side simply because of odd timing.
As of right now, crewed Soyuz flights have been ended pending an investigation meaning there are currently no operational launch systems in place for humans to get to space until the commercial crew program takes flight in the upcoming months – something which may strain operations on the International Space Station.
It should be noted there have been a few previous launch aborts in the over 130 crewed Soyuz launches, and that the Soyuz booster launches more often than I believe nearly any other rocket – over its life it’s certainly had far more launches through its various forms than any other booster family, at the very least. It should also be noted that Soyuz refers both to the spacecraft itself, and to the booster which launches the vehicle into orbit.
I’ll be following this event closely a more proper information comes in, as it has far-reaching repercussions for our near future in space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-10