National Post (National Edition)
A reminder of the perils of space flight
People have a funny habit of taking the extraordinary for granted. There’s nothing new about this. We live in an era where technological change is so rapid that almost as soon as new technologies enter the market, we quickly come to rely on them (think: smartphones or Wi-Fi) and soon forget how life was without them. But nothing has been accepted as routinely so quickly, and so wrongly, as space travel.
The world was reminded of that this week.
On Thursday, a Russian Soyuz rocket carrying two astronauts lifted off from the Russian space launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Nick Hague, an American NASA astronaut, and Alexey Ovchinin, a Russian cosmonaut, were headed to the International Space Station. The floating laboratory is intended for a crew of six. The three astronauts aboard it currently, all due to return in December, spend most of their time maintaining the station itself. Hague and Ovchinin would have provided badly needed manpower, allowing the station’s primary mission — science — to continue to thrive.
The rocket took off normally, but just over two minutes into the flight, something went very badly wrong. A Soyuz rocket uses four “strap-on” booster rockets to lift off from the ground and reach the edge of space; once there, with their fuel exhausted, the boosters separate from the main rocket and fall away. The main rocket then ignites and pushes itself fully into orbit, with the capsule containing the crew atop it. On Thursday, for reasons that may take months to fully understand, the four strap-on boosters lifted the Soyuz to the edge of space normally, but after they separated, the main engine did not ignite.
This was extraordinarily dangerous. The crew and their capsule were already moving at an incredible speed, but not quite fast enough to safely enter stable orbit. With only seconds to diagnose the problem and act, the crew were forced to execute an emergency abort in mid-flight, only the second time in the history of any nation’s space program that this has happened. This is something that crews practice and plan for, and thankfully, the abort manoeuvre was successful.
After a very fast, very hard re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, the crew landed 400 kilometres from where they’d started, and were quickly rescued. They are in good health.
This dramatic episode serves as a reminder of how dangerous space travel remains. We are living in an absolutely fascinating era. Mankind is taking its first, tentative steps into the vast universe that surrounds us. Every day the International Space Station remains in operation is a tribute to human ingenuity. Every rocket flight to it, carrying crew or supplies, is a marvel of engineering and technology.
But these missions, and the mere existence of the US$100-billion science lab in the sky, are largely ignored. Space exploration news is a subset of geeky science reporting, if it’s reported on at all. Enormous technological leaps — think of SpaceX’s mastering of reusable rockets in recent years — transition from damn-near miraculous to utterly routine events in the blink of an eye. The wonder of it all is lost. This is a tragedy. But it’s become predictable.
The next few months, at any rate, won’t be quite so routine. The Russians have already announced a full investigation into what caused Thursday’s near disaster.
And there is a very real chance that the Soyuz fleet — currently the only crewed vehicles capable of reaching the space station while America prepares to test two new ships next year — will be grounded for months while that investigation takes place.
The three astronauts aboard the station at present have enough supplies to stay there safely, but their only ride back to Earth — another Soyuz currently docked at the station — has a limited operational window. It’s intended to return to Earth no later than December.
If the Russians can’t get their fleet flying before that ship runs out of runway, the international partners that operate the station will have to make a tough decision. The station was not designed to operate without a crew. What if the astronauts have to return to Earth before the next crew is able to arrive? Will they stay aboard, at significant risk, or will the station be abandoned, even if only temporarily?
These stories will be in the public eye in the coming months. They should be. But that should always be true. Some of the smartest among us are working to do amazing things every day. We are slowly stepping out into that final frontier. This is worth a little attention.