Soyuz MS-10

History

A booster failure shortly after launch forced an emergency abort of the Soyuz MS-10 mission. Since the launch escape tower had already been discarded, the crew capsule separated using solid rocket motors on its fairing.

Cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and astronaut Nick Hague landed safely. This marked the first Russian crewed booster mishap in 35 years, following the Soyuz T-10-1 launch pad explosion in 1983. A mission video was released on November 1, 2018.

Mission

Liftoff occurred at 08:40 UTC. The crew reported feeling weightless shortly after, and mission control declared a booster had failed. Sergei Krikalev stated the primary cause was a collision during separation of the first and second stages, with a deviation from the standard trajectory and disintegration of the lower part of the second stage. A contingency was declared, and the spacecraft performed an emergency separation, returning on a ballistic trajectory where the crew experienced about six to seven times Earth's gravity.

The abort occurred at about 50 km altitude; the spacecraft reached an apogee of 93 km and landed 19 minutes 41 seconds after launch. The search and rescue team deployed at 08:55 UTC recovered the crew and spacecraft 402 km from the launch site and 20 km east of Jezkazgan. NASA announced contact with the crew about 25 minutes after the team took off, and photographs showed them undergoing medical tests at Jezkazgan Airport at 12:04 UTC. The crew then flew to Baikonur Cosmodrome to meet their families before leaving for Moscow.

Aftermath

The Russian government announced a temporary suspension of crewed Soyuz launches. Roscosmos ordered a full state commission to investigate, and the BBC reported that a criminal investigation was also expected. A separate investigation into a hole drilled in the Soyuz MS-09 capsule had begun a few weeks earlier. The MS-10 commission started its investigation on 15 October 2018 after collecting rocket debris.

Initially a faulty cable was suspected, but by 17 October the commission focused on the manufacturing sequence and set a deadline of 21 October. By 18 October, failure to correctly mate the first stage booster with the first stage core was identified as the likely cause; the side booster was likely damaged and re-contacted the core during separation. On 22 October the deadline was extended to 30 October, with a preliminary report blaming a damaged separation sensor, similar to an uncrewed failure in 1986.

The commission report on 31 October concluded that a ball joint supporting the errant side booster was deformed during assembly, preventing proper separation, while the sensor and separation motor had worked properly. Since the investigation identified an assembly error requiring no material change to the Soyuz-FG configuration, the next crewed flight (MS-11) was scheduled for 3 December 2018. Dmitry Rogozin said within a day that Ovchinin and Hague would fly again in early 2019, and in December it was announced they would fly on Soyuz MS-12 as part of Expedition 59/60, with Ovchinin commanding Expedition 60.

MS-12 launched successfully on 14 March 2019. The MS-10 descent module was installed outside Roscosmos headquarters and unveiled on 2 December 2019. MS-10 was one of six Soyuz missions studied in a 2021 research paper on environmental damage from failed launches; its propellants were not found to have caused significant soil pollution at its crash sites.