Crew arrives after ‘flawless launch’ to ISS
Astronauts are first to blast off since failed Oct. attempt
The hugs NASA astronaut Anne McClain received as she floated through the International Space Station hatch Monday weren’t unusual greetings for a new crewmate, but there’s no doubt they held a little more weight.
The last attempt to send a crew to the space station didn’t succeed.
“I’m very proud of this international team and what we did today,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, during a livestream following the launch. “What we got to see is a tribute to the work (the team) put in over these past several weeks — a short amount of time.”
Monday marked Russia’s first crewed mission to the space station since Oct. 11,
when its Soyuz spacecraft transporting American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin had to abort its launch after a rocket booster failed and forced an emergency landing.
NASA announced Monday that a mission has been added in February, giving Hague and Ovchinin a second chance to live on the space station. They will be joined by American astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, a member of the 2013 astronaut class who initially was scheduled to fly in April.
The October abort was Russia’s first in 35 years, and many officials deemed it a success because Hague and Ovchinin were safe and in good condition. But some space experts questioned whether Russia’s space program was up to snuff, especially because the abort was preceded by the discovery of a hole that caused an air leak on a Soyuz docked on the space station in August.
Russian officials in November announced that the failed launch was the result of a malfunctioning sensor that caused the first and second stages of the rocket launching the Soyuz to crash into each other. The second stage was broken and forced an emergency landing.
The sensor was damaged, Russian officials said, during the rocket’s assembly at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where the Soyuz is launched.
There still is no word on what caused the hole in the space station, but the Russians are conducting a spacewalk Dec. 11 to look at the exterior of the Soyuz, said Kelly Humphries, NASA spokesman. In the meantime, a patch put in place by the crew is holding.
NASA has relied on Russia to transport American astronauts to the space station since 2011, when the U.S. space shuttle program was shuttered. Commercial vehicles being built by SpaceX and Boeing are meant to alleviate that reliance, but the programs are behind schedule.
The crew on the station — NASA’s Serena Auñón-Chancellor, European Space Agency’s Alexander Gerst and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev — arrived in June and are scheduled to return to Earth on Dec. 20.
Gerst warmly welcomed McClain, Russia’s Oleg Kononenko and the Canadian Space Agency’s David Saint-Jacques to space via Twitter on Monday morning.
“Congratulations to the Russian Space Agency @roscosmos and all international partners for a flawless launch of #SoyuzMS11,” he wrote.
October’s aborted flight would have made Hague the first in his 2013 astronaut class to fly. McClain now holds that title.
Because of the abort, NASA had to cancel two spacewalks to upgrade the space station’s power systems that were supposed to be conducted by Hague. There is a possibility McClain could conduct those in his stead, though an official decision had not been made as of last month.
In the meantime, Hague and Ovchinin have a path forward for flight. There still are many unknowns, however, about the coming year on the space station.
“We know their launch date, but we don’t know exactly when they’ll return,” Gerstenmaier said. “We don’t know exactly the details of 2019.”