Russian crewed launch to ISS this morning suffered a booster failure. Nature of the failure unknown at the moment. Crew module is currently in a ballistic descent. Maybe 90 minutes before rescue forces are able to reach the crew.

zanl188 wrote:

Russian crewed launch to ISS this morning suffered a booster failure. Nature of the failure unknown at the moment. Crew module is currently in a ballistic descent. Maybe 90 minutes before rescue forces are able to reach the crew.

Yikes, good luck to them!

zanl188 wrote:

Russian crewed launch ...

Astronaut Nick Hague of NASA and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos

According to NASA TV the Russians report they're in radio contact with the crew and they're back on the ground and safe. Still some time for the pickup but the worst bit is over.

Now for the investigation to get into full swing.

My guess from watching the video of the launch is a problem in the booster separation mechanism. Just when you expect the Korelev cross to appear is when things go bad.

From NASA twitter:

returning to Earth via a ballistic descent, which is a sharper angle of landing compared to normal.

Doesn't the Soyuz always do a ballistic descent? It doesn't have any lifting surfaces.
Anyway very glad that the crew is well.

mxaxai wrote:

Doesn't the Soyuz always do a ballistic descent? It doesn't have any lifting surfaces.

No. Soyuz reverts to ballistic reentries in emergency situations. Crewed spacecraft have been lifting bodies since Gemini in the U.S. program. I believe Soyuz has been a lifting body since inception.

Interesting that they landed 250 miles away from the launch site, they were scrambling choppers to get there ASAP; yet there's decent footage of their emergency landing....in the middle of nowhere.

No Tax On Rotax

mxaxai wrote:

From NASA twitter:

returning to Earth via a ballistic descent, which is a sharper angle of landing compared to normal.

Doesn't the Soyuz always do a ballistic descent? It doesn't have any lifting surfaces.
Anyway very glad that the crew is well.

As zanl188 notes a more normal entry uses the capsule as a lifting body to re-enter more gradually and in a controlled manner. Reducing the Gs the crew feels and putting the capsule into a designated landing area.

The ballistic re-entry on the other hand is essentially uncontrolled and at a much steeper angle of re-entry. So the crew will be pulling much higher Gs and tumbling about while landing somewhere in a much larger area.

Think a paper plane vs a scrunched up paper ball. One is controlled, the other up to the whims of randomness.

I've seen comments saying a previous case where there was a ballistic re-entry the Gs were recorded at up to 21G, compared to up to 6G for a normal re-entry. Not a fun way to get back to earth at all even if it is survivable.

When you look at the live stream, you can actually see the unsymmetrical Korolev’s Cross. The Block G booster (the one going to the right) seems to be tumbling different to the others. Additionally it seems to be going at a 45°-ish angle compared to where you would expect it to be going. A couple of seconds later the 2nd stage appears to be out of control (you can actually see the body rotating away from the direction of flight)

From the inside shots I see sudden lateral acceleration, based on the hands and the tablets they are holding. Indicating either a pendulum effect, but more likely a tumbling around an axis perpendicular to the direction of flight. I guess the landing capsule has already separated from the main rocket body at that Point.

I would say something went wrong with the separation of the Block G booster, likely being that one of the straps at the lower end did not release, causing the rocket to be forced to yaw and roll. This is based on the direction the booster had after seperation. The launch escape tower was already disposed of about 5 seconds earlier, so I guess the booster simply shut down after detecting the anomaly. This was then followed by the seperation of the landing capsule.

But hey, that is only based on what I saw in the stream...

Cheers,
Roboman

Edit: added some clarifications.

Thanks interesting observations.

This means Soyuz is going to be grounded for a while. No crewed launches for now to the ISS.

Also, it may also mean the ISS might need to be abandoned for a bit until the stand down has been resolved; the current Soyuz capsule has been up there since June, and the Soyuz spacecraft has a rated endurance of about 200 days; this means it needs to come back down in January 2019. So, unless the stand down is resolved for MS-11's launch this December, the current ISS crew will need to return to Earth with the MS-09 capsule this January.

Not very good options moving forward if the stand down lasts for a while; either NASA and SpaceX needs to get the ball rolling quickly and massively accelerate the crewed Dragon tests, or the ISS will need to be abandoned in January.

First the drilled leak now the booster issue. After years of reliable performance. Has anything changed over there?

Noshow wrote:

First the drilled leak now the booster issue. After years of reliable performance. Has anything changed over there?

Decades of coasting on past achievements. Now all that previous institutional knowledge and experience have retired and new blood is in with the current problems around corruption.

We've been starting to see this happen through previous issues with the uncrewed missions. We are now seeing it bleed over into the crewed components. A sad state of being for the history of the Russian space program.

ThePointblank wrote:

This means Soyuz is going to be grounded for a while. No crewed launches for now to the ISS.

Also, it may also mean the ISS might need to be abandoned for a bit until the stand down has been resolved; the current Soyuz capsule has been up there since June, and the Soyuz spacecraft has a rated endurance of about 200 days; this means it needs to come back down in January 2019. So, unless the stand down is resolved for MS-11's launch this December, the current ISS crew will need to return to Earth with the MS-09 capsule this January.

Not very good options moving forward if the stand down lasts for a while; either NASA and SpaceX needs to get the ball rolling quickly and massively accelerate the crewed Dragon tests, or the ISS will need to be abandoned in January.

They can send an unmanned replacement Soyuz up.

Duplicate deleted.

Nomadd wrote:

ThePointblank wrote:

This means Soyuz is going to be grounded for a while. No crewed launches for now to the ISS.

Also, it may also mean the ISS might need to be abandoned for a bit until the stand down has been resolved; the current Soyuz capsule has been up there since June, and the Soyuz spacecraft has a rated endurance of about 200 days; this means it needs to come back down in January 2019. So, unless the stand down is resolved for MS-11's launch this December, the current ISS crew will need to return to Earth with the MS-09 capsule this January.

Not very good options moving forward if the stand down lasts for a while; either NASA and SpaceX needs to get the ball rolling quickly and massively accelerate the crewed Dragon tests, or the ISS will need to be abandoned in January.

They can send an unmanned replacement Soyuz up.

Or an unmanned Crew Dragon.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6264339/Rocket-launch-booster-malfunction-forces-astronauts-return-Earth-ballistic-entry.html

Don’t bother reading any of the words in this article (they repeatedly refer to the capsule as “the shuttle”), but go for pics of the landed capsule and the crew walking away. Hard not to feel claustrophobic looking at the soze of the capsule vs the size of the people standing next to it. Thank God they’re safe!

notaxonrotax wrote:

Interesting that they landed 250 miles away from the launch site, they were scrambling choppers to get there ASAP; yet there's decent footage of their emergency landing....in the middle of nowhere.

No Tax On Rotax

+1
I was wondering about that too. It took rescue teams 90 minutes to get to the downed crew, but the cameraman was ready and filming right at the moment of emergency landing.....weird.

ZaphodHarkonnen wrote:

Noshow wrote:

First the drilled leak now the booster issue. After years of reliable performance. Has anything changed over there?

Decades of coasting on past achievements. Now all that previous institutional knowledge and experience have retired and new blood is in with the current problems around corruption.

We've been starting to see this happen through previous issues with the uncrewed missions. We are now seeing it bleed over into the crewed components. A sad state of being for the history of the Russian space program.

A meaningless statement. There is nothing in the space program that could work by inertia. The rockets that are launching now were built less than five years ago, as were the ships.
Well, the technique brings-up to this point, "Soyuz-FG" flew 65 launches without accident. The main thing is that the crew was not injured.

WingsFan wrote:

notaxonrotax wrote:

Interesting that they landed 250 miles away from the launch site, they were scrambling choppers to get there ASAP; yet there's decent footage of their emergency landing....in the middle of nowhere.

No Tax On Rotax

+1
I was wondering about that too. It took rescue teams 90 minutes to get to the downed crew, but the cameraman was ready and filming right at the moment of emergency landing.....weird.

I would think Tracking cameras along the flight path are not unusual, placing rescue helicopters alongside of them would seem rather odd.
Any camera placed to keep an eye one the boosters during decent had a good shot I would think.

Best regards
Thomas

Where is this landing footage being discussed? I have not seen any.

WingsFan wrote:

notaxonrotax wrote:

Interesting that they landed 250 miles away from the launch site, they were scrambling choppers to get there ASAP; yet there's decent footage of their emergency landing....in the middle of nowhere.

No Tax On Rotax

+1
I was wondering about that too. It took rescue teams 90 minutes to get to the downed crew, but the cameraman was ready and filming right at the moment of emergency landing.....weird.

This could be a photo from a recent landing of Soyuz MS-08.

Scorpius wrote:

ZaphodHarkonnen wrote:

Noshow wrote:

First the drilled leak now the booster issue. After years of reliable performance. Has anything changed over there?

Decades of coasting on past achievements. Now all that previous institutional knowledge and experience have retired and new blood is in with the current problems around corruption.

We've been starting to see this happen through previous issues with the uncrewed missions. We are now seeing it bleed over into the crewed components. A sad state of being for the history of the Russian space program.

A meaningless statement. There is nothing in the space program that could work by inertia. The rockets that are launching now were built less than five years ago, as were the ships.
Well, the technique brings-up to this point, "Soyuz-FG" flew 65 launches without accident. The main thing is that the crew was not injured.

Institutional knowledge and experiance is very much a thing. No matter how much you document and checklist there will always be things that someone just knows how to do. And if the leadership doesn't encourage retaining of this it will go away as people leave. Stuff like the hole in the orbital section of the previous Soyuz raise questions about company culture set by leadership. This is only going to add to such thoughts until the results of the investigation are out.

Of course the investigation will be the source of truth on what happened. Not our guessing in the meantime.

It looks like one of the boosters didn't separate from the core cleanly. The Russians usually refer to the core as the 2nd stage.

DarkKnight5 wrote:

Nomadd wrote:

ThePointblank wrote:

This means Soyuz is going to be grounded for a while. No crewed launches for now to the ISS.

Also, it may also mean the ISS might need to be abandoned for a bit until the stand down has been resolved; the current Soyuz capsule has been up there since June, and the Soyuz spacecraft has a rated endurance of about 200 days; this means it needs to come back down in January 2019. So, unless the stand down is resolved for MS-11's launch 0this December, the current ISS crew will need to return to Earth with the MS-09 capsule this January.

Not very good options moving forward if the stand down lasts for a while; either NASA and SpaceX needs to get the ball rolling quickly and massively accelerate the crewed Dragon tests, or the ISS will need to be abandoned in January.

They can send an unmanned replacement Soyuz up.

Or an unmanned Crew Dragon.

No such thing until it's certified. DM1 doesn't have life support, and DM2 won't be ready for months.

Nomadd wrote:

DarkKnight5 wrote:

Nomadd wrote:

They can send an unmanned replacement Soyuz up.

Or an unmanned Crew Dragon.

No such thing until it's certified. DM1 doesn't have life support, and DM2 won't be ready for months.

Necessity can be the mother of accelerated timelines. Not saying it’s going to happen or is likely to happen, but two Soyuz problems in eight weeks makes one consider other options.

Nomadd wrote:

DarkKnight5 wrote:

Nomadd wrote:

They can send an unmanned replacement Soyuz up.

Or an unmanned Crew Dragon.

No such thing until it's certified. DM1 doesn't have life support, and DM2 won't be ready for months.

DM1 is sitting complete, waiting on NASA to finish up their paperwork for the OK to launch. SpaceX could technically launch it now, assuming that they have a Falcon 9 Block 5 ready to go; the main hold ups was scheduling conflicts at the ISS (which for obvious reasons, no longer exists), and NASA paperwork.

The sooner DM1 flies, the more time SpaceX has to resolve any issues that the DM1 flight may show up. So flying it sooner reduces slippage of DM2.

But this all depends on how long the stand down for Soyuz goes for; if indications are that the Soyuz stand down is going to last for more than a few months, some fires will get lit under a few feet and pressure to get the launch schedule both for Crewed Dragon and for Starliner trending leftwards on a dramatic scale.

I'm sure NASA does not want to run the ISS unmanned for extended periods due to a lengthy Soyuz stand down, and if the ISS is unmanned, this would cause significant schedule slippage for the Commercial Crew Program as well.

That shimmy just after booster failure is really terrifying, especially from the inside view. Quite a sturdy craft to withstand that kind of lateral stresses without just ripping apart, those two guys are lucky to have made it back to the surface in one piece.

There is an option to solve the problem - the next launch of the manned "Soyuz" to be held at the end of December in unmanned mode. This would give the possibility to prolong the flight of the expedition to the ISS, and at the same time to meet the conditions of the at least one test run without a crew. Dmitry Rogozin said yesterday that the crew of Soyuz MS-10 will be sent to space-approximately re-launch will take place in the spring or summer of 2019.

Passengers of the Soyuz returned in a Tu-134, not sure what's scarier, the aborted launch or the ride in this rust bucket:

https://twitter.com/roscosmos/status/10 ... 3309076481

A3801000 wrote:

Passengers of the Soyuz returned in a Tu-134, not sure what's scarier, the aborted launch or the ride in this rust bucket:

https://twitter.com/roscosmos/status/10 ... 3309076481

Afaics the "rust" you notice are the "cut here" marks for emergency access.
In all other aspects: that plane looks cleaner than any AF frame

tommy1808 wrote:

WingsFan wrote:

notaxonrotax wrote:

Interesting that they landed 250 miles away from the launch site, they were scrambling choppers to get there ASAP; yet there's decent footage of their emergency landing....in the middle of nowhere.

No Tax On Rotax

+1
I was wondering about that too. It took rescue teams 90 minutes to get to the downed crew, but the cameraman was ready and filming right at the moment of emergency landing.....weird.

I would think Tracking cameras along the flight path are not unusual, placing rescue helicopters alongside of them would seem rather odd.
Any camera placed to keep an eye one the boosters during decent had a good shot I would think.

Best regards
Thomas

It may seem odd, but let's have a look at this presentation:
" The spacecraft reaches orbit less than nine minutes after the liftoff, however in case of emergency, the capsule with the crew could land as far as 5,000 kilometers downrange or even splash down into the Pacific Ocean. As a result, an armada of search and rescue aircraft is deployed at airfields along the ascent trajectory all the way to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East and at least one ship is on stand by in the Sea of Japan. A total of nine fixed-wing aircraft, 16 helicopters are supporting the launch."

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz_la ... NuITURmz58

tomcat wrote:

tommy1808 wrote:

WingsFan wrote:

+1
I was wondering about that too. It took rescue teams 90 minutes to get to the downed crew, but the cameraman was ready and filming right at the moment of emergency landing.....weird.

I would think Tracking cameras along the flight path are not unusual, placing rescue helicopters alongside of them would seem rather odd.
Any camera placed to keep an eye one the boosters during decent had a good shot I would think.

Best regards
Thomas

It may seem odd, but let's have a look at this presentation:
" The spacecraft reaches orbit less than nine minutes after the liftoff, however in case of emergency, the capsule with the crew could land as far as 5,000 kilometers downrange or even splash down into the Pacific Ocean. As a result, an armada of search and rescue aircraft is deployed at airfields along the ascent trajectory all the way to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East and at least one ship is on stand by in the Sea of Japan. A total of nine fixed-wing aircraft, 16 helicopters are supporting the launch."

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz_la ... NuITURmz58

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t answer the question of whether there is footage of THIS landing or whether some news organization ran old footage as an example of how the capsule lands.

Video of booster assembly for this mission:

https://youtu.be/3k9u866agyI

I hope the gent working at the forward end of that booster is careful where he puts his fingers in relation to the ball and socket. Made me cringe...

Investigation is looking at one of these boosters apparently failing to shutdown and then detach correctly.

On-the-Soyuz video of the failed booster separation [looking down the core vehicle]. The core vehicle tumbled very violently after the tank rupture. GREAT multi-mode escape system design.

Soyuz launch fail video Russian commission: Soyuz MS-10 Soyuz Rocket Launch failure Original footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXFwUfA4iHU

Turns out there's a pin coming out of the ball on top of the booster that triggers a sensor when the ball leaves the socket that opens a valve to use O2 to push the top of the booster away from the core. The monkeys assembling the rocket improperly forced the ball into the socket and bent the pin, so the top of the booster never got it's seperation push.