NASA astronauts will still ride Russian rockets after launch failure
Despite a launch failure that forced two astronauts — an American and a Russian — to perform a dramatic emergency landing in Kazakhstan last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is confident that Americans will continue to take rides on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in the coming months.
In a string of videos from a news conference in Moscow posted to Bridenstine’s Twitter profile on Sunday, the relatively new NASA head said the space agency is supporting the Rus-
sians as they investigate the cause of Thursday’s rocket booster failure. Until then, all crewed flights to the International Space Station are suspended.
“We have a really good idea of what happened. We want to figure out why it happened,” Bridenstine said. “I fully anticipate at this point that we will fly again on a Russian Soyuz rocket, and I have no reason to believe at this point that it won’t be on schedule.”
The three astronauts on board the International Space Station — NASA’s Serena Auñón-Chancellor, European Space Agency’s Alexander Gerst and Roscosmos’ Sergey Prokopyev — are scheduled to return to Earth on Dec. 13. The next mission to the station would take place Dec. 20, carrying NASA’s Anne McClain, Roscosmos’ Oleg Kononenko and Canadian Space Agency’s David Saint-Jacques. If those deadlines aren’t met, the space station could be without a crew for the first time in 18 years.
Last week’s rocket failure was a rarity for Russia’s crewed program, which hasn’t had a failure in more than three decades. Two minutes into the launch, with Bridenstine present to watch, NASA’s Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexey Ovchinin aborted and their capsule separated from the rocket, landing in a field via parachute. Neither astronaut was harmed.
Bridenstine, who has been NASA administrator for about six months, stressed the importance of Russia and the U.S. working together and of what he called “dissimilar redundancy.”
“In other words, if there is a hiccup in one country’s system, there is another country’s system capable of maintaining the operation until the first country is ready to go again,” he said. “So I think this demonstrates how important it is to have collaboration and to not be dependent on one system or another system.”
That’s not the case yet with trips to the space station. Only the Russians take astronauts to space — until, at least, Boeing and SpaceX begin their crewed launches from the Space Coast next summer per the current schedule.
As of Monday, the probe into the failure continued with Roscosmos investigating Progress Space Rocket Center, the booster’s developer and manufacturer, according to state-run news agency TASS.
So far, American astronaut Hauge’s Friday spacewalk is canceled, and the planned Oct. 25 spacewalk for him and Gerst is in limbo. Cosmonaut Ovchinin’s Nov. 19 spacewalk is also canceled.