In case you haven’t heard the news, that’s the story of the day: Soyuz, the Russian vector that since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 has been tasked with taking astronauts back and forth from the ISS, malfunctioned. The two astronauts on board were obliged to an emergency landing.
“Shortly after taking off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin reported a problem with the rocket’s booster. The men were forced into a “ballistic descent”, with their capsule landing a few hundred miles north of Baikonur. They have been picked up by rescuers. ‘The search and recovery teams have reached the Soyuz spacecraft landing site and report that the two crew members… are in good condition and are out of the capsule,’ US space agency Nasa said. Russia said it was suspending any further manned flights, and an investigation into what went wrong had begun.” (Read the whole story here).
Now, considering that no other spacecraft is cleared for manned flights so far, this is going to have a huge impact on the ISS, which risks becoming unoccupied in the following months. As the Russian space agency Roscosmos declared, the Soyuz will be grounded while Russian investigators try to figure out exactly what happened today, and how to prevent it from occurring again.
How to avoid leaving the ISS alone in orbit? Space X is the answer. It has been a few years since NASA’s Commercial Crew Program pushed for the development of a private American astronaut spacecraft. Two of the most promising are SpaceX and Boeing, with their vehicles Crew Dragon and the CST-100 Starliner.
So far, Elon Musk’s company has done multiple flights to the ISS with payload but no astronauts: SpaceX’s first crewed test flight is currently scheduled for June 2019 and Boeing’s for August. Let’s hope they get their rockets ready to fly.
Watch Soyuz’s failure as explained by former astronaut Chris Hadfield:
Eek! Not ideal, is it?
No, it is not. Let’s hope Space X tests deliver what everybody expects…
Oh yes! Fingers crossed…