The emergency commission set up by Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos will study photos of the Soyuz spacecraft's flight and the accident, Sergey Krikalev, the executive director of human space programs at Roscosmos, told Sputnik on Thursday.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th October, 2018) The emergency commission set up by Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos will study photos of the Soyuz spacecraft's flight and the accident, Sergey Krikalev, the executive director of human space programs at Roscosmos, told Sputnik on Thursday.
"The emergency commission has just begun work, it will collect all the data, including photos, which were made with the telephoto lens from the Earth," he said.
Earlier in the day, the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle failed to take the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft with the new crew of the International Space Station (ISS) into space. Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague managed to eject in a rescue capsule and make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan alive and unharmed. This became the first failure of a manned space launch in modern Russian history.
Sources familiar with the situation told Sputnik that the accident may have occurred due to the fact that one of the four units of the first stage of Soyuz-FG failed to separate at the planned time, while when it ultimately occurred, it hit the second stage, and triggered the emergency shutdown of the second stage engine. The accident is being investigated by a special commission of Roscosmos.
Until the causes of the emergency are clarified, it was decided to suspend all manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS), which are now being conducted only from the Baikonur cosmodrome and only on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. Russian Prime Minister Yury Borisov expressed hope that NASA "will treat this situation with understanding."
