A Russian Soyuz FG rocket malfunctioned two minutes after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday morning, forcing the two men on board—a Russian cosmonaut and NASA astronaut—to abort the flight and use emergency procedures to land a few hundred miles from the launch site. Both NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin are reported in “good condition” with Russian crews on the way to the landing site. The failure of the Soyuz craft is likely to result in a prolonged review of this failure and procedures within the Russian space program. This could mean that the three people currently on the International Space Station—US astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor, cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, and German astronaut Alexander Gerst—may be there for some time.
With delays in the progress of both the SpaceX Crew Dragon program and Boeing’s Starliner vehicle, the Soyuz remains the only man-rated rocket capable of docking with the ISS. Multiple boosters from the US, Russia, Europe, and Japan are capable of bringing supplies to the station. But for the moment, there simply is no ride available for the astronauts on board.
The Soyuz—an updated form of a vehicle that’s been in service since the 1960s—has been highly reliable. Since 2002, Russia has had four failures of unmanned rockets, but this is the first failure of the Soyuz since it became the only manned vehicle going to the ISS after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. Development of a US alternative for transporting astronauts is now more than two years behind the initial target. Both Boeing and Space X were supposed to conduct test flights of their manned craft this year, but those flights have been steadily moved back.
Neither US company is scheduled to fly their craft before the first of the year, and even then that will be an unmanned flight—if astronauts are still waiting on the ISS at that time, they’ll have to grit their teeth through an unmanned capsule arriving and leaving without them. These flights are scheduled to be followed by at least one test flight for each capsule in which the same astronauts stay with the capsule. NASA recently named the crews who would be the first to fly on the SpaceX and Boeing crafts.
It’s still unclear what triggered the Thursday morning failure. Images from the time of the booster failure show objects, including strap-on boosters, falling away from the main body of the Soyuz, but this may have been by design. The rocket did not undergo an in-flight explosion, it simply failed to reach orbit, requiring the two men to undergo a ballistic flight carrying them rapidly back to Earth.
In September, a leak was found in a Soyuz craft attached to the ISS. While that leak did not ultimately represent a threat to the astronauts, it did appear to be the result of either human error—or human malfeasance—rather than damage from a micrometeorite. That leak led to recriminations, with accusations being directed at both workers on the Soyuz program and the crew on the ISS. The combination of the recent leak and the failure of the FG booster is sure to lead to suggestions of either falling safety standards or deliberate sabotage within the Russian program.
A Soyuz is currently docked with the ISS as an escape craft in case of an emergency, but if the ISS crew were to depart, it would leave the station unoccupied for the first time since Nov. 2, 2000.