American, Russian astronauts safe after emergency landing of Soyuz MS-10

Director General of the Russia state corporation Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, right, accompanies Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, crew members of the mission to the International Space Station, ISS, to the rocket prior the launch of Soyuz-FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (Yuri Kochetkov, Pool Photo via AP) less Director General of the Russia state corporation Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, right, accompanies Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, crew members of the mission to the International Space Station, ISS, to the ... more Photo: Yuri Kochetkov, AP Photo: Yuri Kochetkov, AP Image 1 of / 60 Caption Close American, Russian astronauts safe after emergency landing of Soyuz MS-10 1 / 60 Back to Gallery

U.S. astronauts are grounded for the foreseeable future as officials investigate why a rocket booster on the Russian spacecraft transporting NASA’s Nick Hague to the International Space Station failed Thursday, forcing a dramatic emergency landing.

The ballistic landing after launch — which occurs when the spacecraft comes back to Earth at a sharper angle than what’s considered normal, subjecting astronauts to heavy gravitational force — is a first for the Soyuz spacecraft since the Russians began ferrying Americans to the orbiting laboratory after the Space Shuttle program was shuttered in 2011.

NASA officials said Thursday they still are unsure of the cause, but Russian state-run news agency TASS has reported that officials there have opened a criminal investigation into the botched launch. NASA also is investigating.

Both Hague and his crewmate, Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, are safe and in good condition, officials said. And as a whole, Thursday’s emergency could have been much worse.

The emergency landing “shows that, in the first time post-Columbia we’ve had to deal with a potentially dangerous or lethal human space flight accident, all the safety systems worked correctly,” said Keith Cowing, editor of NASA Watch, a website devoted to space news. In February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry, killing the entire crew.

Still, it’s the second mishap in as many months for the Soyuz, considered by experts one of the safest spacecraft ever built. In August, an air-leak-causing hole was discovered in a different Soyuz attached to the space station. Though astronauts successfully plugged the hole, Russia still is investigating the cause of that incident.

The back-to-back problems give some experts pause.

“I have a lot of anxiety that (the Russians’) attempt to solve this or explain this will be the most difficult step,” said James Oberg, a former NASA engineer who worked for 20 years in Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center.

“Understanding how this happened and how to keep it from happening again is going to be a major challenge,” said Oberg, who is also an expert on the Russian space program.

NASA now finds itself in an unfortunate situation. Though it spends a significant amount of money on the space station each year — $1.45 billion in fiscal year 2017 alone, not counting transportation costs — it has no way of getting its astronauts there.

The Soyuz currently is the only way to travel to the space station, and the U.S. pays Russia $82 million for each seat on the capsule. Boeing and SpaceX’s commercial crew vehicles, which were supposed to be ready this year, still are not. NASA now projects that the companies’ first test flights will happen in mid-summer 2019, but the dates could slip again.

The aborted launch was the third major setback to befall NASA this week. On Monday, the space agency announced that the Hubble Space Telescope was temporarily shut down because of a mechanical failure that crippled the groundbreaking observatory. On Wednesday, NASA’s inspector general reported that cost and scheduling problems will likely delay the launch of Orion — the spacecraft being built to take humans back to the moon — past its scheduled mid-2020 liftoff.

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It’s too early to speculate how the failed launch might impact the next Soyuz flight scheduled for Dec. 20, NASA officials say, or if the current three space station crew members will need to extend their stay past December.

“On the December return, we’ll have to let that play out a little bit and see if we can’t get this narrowed down,” said Kenny Todd, space station operations integration manager, during a Thursday news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We’re in very good shape for the crew aboard” in terms of food and supplies.

When Hague and Ovchinin strapped into the Soyuz at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan before Thursday morning’s launch (at 3:39 a.m. Houston time), both thought they wouldn’t touch Earth again until 2019.

But about 2 minutes into their launch, just as the Soyuz reached the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, a light in the capsule started blinking. There’d been a rocket failure.

The Soyuz automatically initiated an abort sequence and, 34 minutes later, Hague and Ovchinin were back on the ground, being helped out of the spacecraft by a Russian search-and-rescue team.

Hague, a 43-year-old from Kansas, would have been the first member of NASA’s 2013 astronaut class to reach low Earth orbit, where the space station flies. It would have been his first spaceflight.

In September, Hague told the Houston Chronicle he was excited for his mission, adding that he was struck by the Russians’ commitment to safety.

“I’ve been over here in (Russia) working side-by-side with the Russian space program and I can tell you they’re committed to making sure they deliver a safe vehicle and it performs safely,” he said. “Everyone has crew safety in mind.”

It’s not clear when, or if, Hague will get the chance to fly again.

“Nick is an outstanding astronaut,” Reid Wiseman, deputy chief astronaut at Johnson Space Center, said at the news conference Thursday. “Without a doubt we’ll recycle him, but where that falls in the plan is yet to be determined.”

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Though nothing quite like this has happened since NASA started relying on the Russians to ferry astronauts to the space station, former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson experienced a ballistic re-entry in 2008 when she was returning home from a six-month trip on the station.

Whitson told the Houston Chronicle after that terrifying landing that she remembered feeling waves of nausea as the Soyuz tumbled through the sky.

"I felt my face getting pulled back. It was hard to breathe, and you kind of have to breathe through your stomach, using your diaphragm instead of expanding your chest," said Whitson, who could be not be reached for comment Thursday.

Hague and Ovchinin were set to join a group of three astronauts — including NASA's Serena Auñón-Chancellor — who have been on the space station since June. Soon after the emergency landing, one of those crew members, the European Space Agency's Alexander Gerst, tweeted that he was glad the crew was fine.

"Today showed again what an amazing vehicle the #Soyuz is, to be able to save the crew from such a failure," he wrote. "Spaceflight is hard. And we must keep trying for the benefit of humankind."

A weird anomaly

NASA officials said Thursday they will be investigating the rocket booster failure alongside the Russians to find the source of the problem.

"I think, with regard to the investigation, if you (look) back at the history ... we always work side-by-side as (the Russians) perform, and they give us the insight we need to go through our own processes here," Todd said. "Absolutely I anticipate we will form our own investigation team, just like we've done for every other major anomaly on the Russian side."

But they also must think about how this will impact the program moving forward.

For instance, Hague was supposed to conduct two spacewalks with Gerst this month — one next week and another Oct. 25 — to upgrade the space station power systems. Different arrangements will now need to be made, Todd said.

"We have to look at the plan closely in terms of what to do to conduct those spacewalks," he said.

It's not immediately clear how long the Russian investigation will take or how long the current crew will remain in orbit. But the Soyuz currently attached to the station is considered "safe" for re-entry until January.

"The typical lifetime you see for a Soyuz is somewhere around 200 days," Todd said. "So, the early January time frame is what we'll start to call the end-of-life of the Soyuz."

He cautioned that the Russians still have several months between now and then to figure out what happened and that the amount of supplies on board allows the current crew to easily extend their time on station.

Oberg, however, struggled to find confidence that Russia will sort it out: "How can they figure out how this happened when they can't even figure out how a small hole occurred?"

If the current crew leaves before another can arrive, the space station would be without a crew for the first time in nearly two decades. Todd said NASA could operate the space station for an extended period of time without a crew, though that's not ideal.

"There's nothing that says we can't just continue to do the minimum amount of commanding from the ground," Todd said. "We're not too concerned about that."

But currently, the commercial program requires a space station crew to be on board when the Boeing and SpaceX vehicles dock, since it will be the first time, he added. Updated timetables recently released by NASA expect both companies' test flights to fly by summer 2019, though their launch schedules have continued to slip since they were awarded NASA contracts in 2014.

"If they want to stay eight or nine months, they could come home in American spacecraft. That's the reality," Cowing said. "But (on Friday) Russia could also come back and say this was just a weird anomaly" and the December launch could be fine.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said Thursday he remains committed to ensuring commercial launches happen in 2019.

"Today's incident and the discovery of a hole on Soyuz MS-09 continue to prove the need for the United States to have our own launch capability from U.S. soil," said Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate's Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness.

U.S., Russian tensions

Russia now will have to work double-time to examine Thursday's failure, given that they still are investigating the source of the Soyuz hole found in late August.

After the hole was discovered, Russia immediately launched an investigation — initially estimated to finish in September — into how the hole occurred, whether it was intentional and if other Soyuz modules currently in development also have defects. Russian officials now say that probe won't be complete until November.

The Russians initially thought the hole was the result of space debris, but later said it likely was the result of sloppy drill work, either on Earth or in space. They also determined that the hole was not a manufacturer's defect and, therefore, did not affect any other Soyuz spacecrafts.

The sabotage accusation caused tension between NASA and the Russians, but Todd said Thursday those comments were made by Russia prematurely and have been chalked up to a misunderstanding.

Todd added that discussions between the two countries have been underway and Russia plans to "work with us and share data with us."

Oberg has serious doubts, though, that Russia is capable of figuring out what happened and preventing it from happening again.

"I'm afraid from this and many other events seen in the Russian program that things go wrong, and they never figure out what went wrong. They just rub our shoulders and press on because they're tough," he said. "They get the attitude that things break down but we always overcome them, and they begin to normalize the incident rate instead of living with passionate paranoia."

Alex Stuckey covers NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or twitter.com/alexdstuckey