Astronauts survive fall to Earth
Russian booster rockets fail shortly after launch
An American astronaut and his Russian counterpart survived an emergency landing after their rocket failed midair during launch and careened back to Earth in the skies above Kazakhstan yesterday morning.
The Soyuz MS-10, a Russian spacecraft, was transporting NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, when it launched from Kazakhstan. What was expected to be a sixhour flight to the International Space Station was abruptly curtailed when the rocket reached an altitude of approximately 164,000 feet, at the cusp of space. The booster carrying them failed within two minutes of flight, forcing both astronauts to make a “steep ballistic descent,” NASA said.
“It’s like shooting a bullet out of a rifle barrel,” said NASA deputy chief astronaut Reid Wiseman during a press briefing. “It starts slowly spinning … and then the parachute comes out and they land.”
Paulo Lozano, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics and director of the university’s Space Propulsion Laboratory, said the capsule “went down like a free fall. Everything that goes up must come down.”
Wiseman said the astronauts were alerted about one second in advance by a warning light inside the capsule before it was separated from the malfunctioning Soyuz rocket.
The astronauts reported a brief period of weightlessness, then jettisoned back to Earth at a sharper angle than what is normal, putting Hague and Ovchinin under more than six times the force of gravity. Livestream video of the incident show the two astronauts jerked around in the spacecraft before the video feed cut off.
“My heart was beating hard,” Wiseman said when he saw the abort play out in real time. “‘I hope they get down safe.’ That was the only thing going through my mind.”
NASA said the incident was the first time a crew has failed to reach orbit after liftoff. More importantly, the incident could have easily been a nightmare for the space program — another Challenger. Instead, the two astronauts landed safely a half-hour later, rescued by the capsule’s “automated abort systems” that “is designed to be effective,” said Kenny Todd, the International Space Station manager.
Lozano agrees. “Soyuz rockets are relatively low in risk and the safety record is astounding,” he said. “We don’t normally pay attention to launches like this because they happen so often. In this case, the protocols in place worked.”
Hague is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force with ties to Boston. In 2000, Hague graduated from MIT with a Master of Science in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. In 2013, he joined NASA’s astronaut corps and is the first member of his class to be assigned to a mission and fly into space, Wiseman said.
New NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, who watched the launch at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome along with his Russian counterpart, said Hague and Ovchinin were in good condition. He added that a “thorough investigation into the cause of the incident will be conducted.”