{"id":13548,"date":"2018-10-23T17:50:15","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T09:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasa-administrator-says-russians-on-track-for-december-soyuz-flight-to-station\/"},"modified":"2018-10-23T17:50:15","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T09:50:15","slug":"nasa-administrator-says-russians-on-track-for-december-soyuz-flight-to-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasa-administrator-says-russians-on-track-for-december-soyuz-flight-to-station\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA administrator says Russians on track for December Soyuz flight to station"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"\"
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine speaks at a meeting of the National Space Council on Tuesday in Washington. Credit: NASA\/Aubrey Gemignani<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Russian engineers have a \u201creally, really good idea\u201d about what went wrong during a Soyuz launch to the International Space Station Oct. 11, forcing the ship\u2019s two-man crew to carry out an emergency abort, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Tuesday. He added that he expects the Russians to resume piloted Soyuz flights in December.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile our astronaut and their cosmonaut are home safe, they\u2019re not happy,\u201d Bridenstine said during a meeting of the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence. \u201cThey want to be on the International Space Station, and they cannot wait to go again. So we\u2019re grateful for their enthusiasm. NASA is regrouping, we\u2019re replanning and we\u2019re getting ready to go again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soyuz MS-10 commander Alexey Ovchinin and NASA flight engineer Nick Hague were forced to abort their launch to the station when one of the normally reliable Soyuz FG booster\u2019s four strap-on first-stage rockets apparently crashed into the base of the second stage core vehicle during separation two minutes after liftoff.<\/p>\n

The Soyuz crew ship\u2019s computer detected the problem and fired thrusters to quickly pull the craft away from the malfunctioning rocket. Ovchinin and Hague landed safely about 250 miles from the launch site. But the abort threw a wrench into the station\u2019s carefully planned crew rotation schedule and while Ovchinin and Hague are expected to fly again, it\u2019s not yet known when.<\/p>\n

Of more immediate concern to NASA, the Russians and their international partners is when the Soyuz rocket will be cleared to resume flights. A Russian \u201cstate commission\u201d investigating the mishap is expected to report its findings around the end of the month.<\/p>\n

Similar versions of the rocket are scheduled for flight in the coming weeks to launch a polar orbiting weather satellite from Kourou, French Guiana, a Progress space station supply ship from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and a Russian navigation satellite from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.<\/p>\n

All of those rockets use identical or similar stage one separation systems and if all three of those flights go well, Russia could proceed with the next launch of a space station crew as early as Dec. 3.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a number of Russian Soyuz rocket launches in the next month and a half and in December, we\u2019re fully anticipating putting our crew on a Russian Soyuz rocket to launch to the International Space Station again,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe have a really, really good idea of what the issue is. We\u2019re getting very close to understanding it even better so we can confidently launch again.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is important to note that while this was a failed launch, it was probably the single most successful failed launch we could have imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hague and Ovchinin had hoped to join Expedition 57 commander Alexander Gerst, Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor and cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev aboard the station. Gerst and his crewmates were launched aboard the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft last June and originally planned to return to Earth on Dec. 13.<\/p>\n

Three fresh crew members \u2014 Oleg Kononenko, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques and NASA astronaut Anne McClain \u2014 were expected to launch on Dec. 20, joining Ovchinin and Hague aboard the lab complex.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A Soyuz rocket lifts off Oct. 11 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Two minutes after liftoff, a rocket failure triggered an emergency landing by the two-man crew on-board. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, because of the launch abort, the Russians must launch Kononenko\u2019s crew ahead of schedule. By taking off in the first week of December, the new crew would have time to carry out an orderly handover before helping Gerst and his crewmates depart around Dec. 20. They have to leave by early January at the latest or their Soyuz will exceed its on-orbit certification.<\/p>\n

With the departure of Gerst, Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor and Prokopyev, Kononenko\u2019s crew will have the station to themselves until April when another Soyuz crew is scheduled for takeoff.<\/p>\n

The original flight plan called for Oleg Skripochka, NASA\u2019s Christina Koch and a United Arab Emirates guest astronaut to take off on April 5. The UAE astronaut then would have returned to Earth about 10 days later with Hague and Ovchinin. Thanks to the launch abort, it\u2019s not yet known who will fly up to the station next spring or how the flights will be sequenced.<\/p>\n

In the near term, NASA hopes to press ahead with launch of a Northrup Grumman Cygnus cargo ship atop an Antares booster from Virginia in mid November followed by launch of a SpaceX Dragon supply craft atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in December.<\/p>\n

Two NASA spacewalks to install a second set of batteries for the space station\u2019s solar power system are on hold, but likely will be carried out after Kononenko\u2019s crew arrives in December.<\/p>\n

A Russian spacewalk by Prokopyev and Kononenko to inspect the Soyuz MS-09 ferry ship likely will be carried out during the crew handover period in December. A small leak in the spacecraft was found and fixed in September and Russian engineers want to find out how extensive the damage might have been and whether it was caused by a deliberate act at some point during the spacecraft\u2019s processing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine speaks at a meeting of the National Space Council on Tuesday in Washington. Credit: NASA\/Aubrey Gemignani Russian engineers have a \u201creally, really good idea\u201d about what went wrong during a Soyuz launch to the International Space Station Oct. 11, forcing the ship\u2019s two-man crew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2501,2801,1545,717,466,25,190,1488],"class_list":["post-13548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-alexey-ovchinin","tag-expedition-57","tag-human-spaceflight","tag-international-space-station","tag-jim-bridenstine","tag-launch","tag-nasa","tag-national-space-council"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}