"We have a really good idea of what happened."
It done blewed all up, Ma!
NASA boss Jim Bridenstine says he's confident the next Russian Soyuz rocket carrying crew and gear to the International Space Station will launch "on schedule." That may come as a surprise to anyone who remembers as far back as October 11, the day Soyuz flight MS-10 was unexpectedly truncated while en route to the orbiting …
He knows something the rest of should know. He's a political appointee who is toeing the line his boss wants re Russia. Trump has been pro-Russia, so why would the statement in support of their space program surprise anyone? I am not claiming that he is wrong or doesn't have additional info concerning the safety of the systems involved, but I distrust all management types as soon as they start sounding different from their engineers and other O&M folks.
@AC, excellent points. I've definitely been in the position of trying to perform a full, comprehensive study into a failure and felt the pressure of having a Harvard Preschool of Management type declaring "we will be done by X" when we haven't even estimated a value for X.
Failure investigations are difficult to plan for and budget, but hey - if you're just a politician everything looks easy.
Aww C'mon
We know that rockets can become an unplanned firework. It has always been so. The Soyutz has been so reliable for so long, that it became boring. Time to get real though. They have been stupidly reliable for years.
Find the fault and the steed rides again. Don't change it if it works.
They mean it was an uncomfortable trip down, because it was a fully ballistic descent, so they experienced more Gs than on a normal descent. You're right though that the actual landing itself was pretty standard (as far as anyone can tell from the details released).
Except possibly from the strong smell of brown trousers inside the capsule ;)
Shame we can't enforce the next crew to consist of May, Hammond, Barnier, Juncker and Tusk (*)
to make the point that "although we hate you politically, at least we can co-operate with each other to actually get things done".
(*) would be remiss of me to suggest using a rocket known to be defective at launch.
giving him such confidence in a launch system that a few short days ago nearly resulted in tragedy.
There are so fantastically many things that can go wrong I'm really not sure this launch got any closer to tragedy than a launch that achieves orbital insertion. A failure mode was anticipated, instruments detected it and mitigations in place performed faultlessly. I would imagine that pretty high on NASAs list of goals is something akin to 'Don't kill anyone', this launch achieved that goal.
Had there been a catastrophic failure that they survived, stage 1 blowing as stage 2 departed for example, that would be a near tragedy. It appears this was simply something wasn't right in the lightup sequence of stage 2 so it didn't go ahead. That's just a malfunction not a near tragedy. Anomalies abort launches all the time, they aren't described as near tragedies. It just so happens that this stage 2 anomaly was detected after launch.
Excatly. Everyone seems to forget that the crew in a Soyuz are spam-in-a-can until they open the hatch to the ISS. (Yes they give them stufff to do to make them feel busy: it is just psychological.) Everything else can be done automatically or as a backup remotely from the MKS in Moscow. Sending up an unmanned Soyuz would not even require the investigation to complete... Thus the time for the crew on board can be extended to at least 500 days. Yes they will get bored. Yes they will miss their families. But then that is space for you.
Cosmonauts they are tough as nails; I expect astronauts too. I'd imagine they'd have viewed that the unplanned decent was at most disappointing regarding not reaching the ISS. No "brown trousers" in the slightest.