Failure to Launch

Whew. This week did not go the way I thought it would, but such is life in the space business sometimes.

You may remember that I work with the Russian vehicles now. There are two of them — the Soyuz, which carries crew, and the Progress, which carries cargo. On Wednesday morning, Progress 44P launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan…and never made it to orbit. It was chock full of supplies for the ISS, but it ended up scattered across Siberia after the third stage of the rocket shut down prematurely.

Fortunately, this was an unmanned cargo mission so no one was put in danger. And fortunately, the ISS is well stocked so there’s no immediate concern about the health or safety of the astronauts and cosmonauts in orbit. But there’s a big issue. The rocket that failed on Wednesday launching an unmanned cargo vehicle is very, VERY similar to the rocket used to launch the Soyuz. That means no more manned missions to the ISS until the Russians investigate the accident and figure out how to correct whatever went wrong.

(The rocket that launches Soyuz is basically just a newer version of the one used to launch Progress. All of the Russian rockets are just variations on a ballistic missile from the 50s, which is great because they have a long history of reliability…but not so great because a problem with one flavor of rocket puts suspicion onto all flavors of rocket. And nothing is 100% reliable.)

But this is the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. With the shuttle program over and the US commercial companies not quite ready to launch cargo — and definitely not ready to launch people — we are counting on the Russians to carry our crews to and from orbit. A launch vehicle failure on the very first mission after the end of shuttle?

Well, it’s not a good situation. At this moment we have no way to launch humans into space and neither does anyone else on the planet…except China.

The Russians will fix the problem, and they’ll launch both cargo and crew again very soon. The next Soyuz launch was scheduled for the end of September and it’s unlikely to be delayed by more than a month or two.

But work will definitely be busy for a while in a way I didn’t expect.