MOSCOW - The crash of a Soyuz-U rocket in northern Russia Tuesday may delay the launch of a three-person crew to the International Space Station (ISS) from Kazakhstan for at least two-three days, a senior official at Rocket Space Corporation Energia told SPACE.com on Thursday.
The official said it will take investigators at least two to three days to arrive at a preliminary conclusion on why one of the rocket's first-stage engines failed, causing the vehicle to crash back at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
One soldier was killed and eight others injured in the disaster.
Meanwhile, engineers have to start fuelling of a Soyuz-FG rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Friday if this vehicle is to be launched as planned at 10:59 p.m. EST on Oct. 27 (0359 GMT on Oct. 28), the Energia official said.
"There is a possibility that the launch would be delayed for two-three days," an Energia official, who did not wish to be identified, told SPACE.com. Should it take investigators more than usual to determine the probable cause of the failure, the ISS launch could be "re-scheduled further to the right," the official said.
He said the next launch window would be a "few days away" from the planned launch date, but would not elaborate. A problem with the first-stage engine caused the Soyuz-U rocket to crash seconds after blastoff, early data shows.
Russian space officials said that very preliminary information, which was available shortly after the ill-fated launch, pointed to one of the engines of the strap-on booster of the launch vehicle as a source of the catastrophic malfunction.
According to Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (Rosaviacosmos), an emergency signal to cut off all engines of the booster stage of the launcher was sent 20 seconds after blastoff.
Known as AVD, which is the Russian abbreviation for Emergency Engine Cutoff, the command is issued automatically by the launch vehicle's flight control system if it detects abnormal performance of the propulsion system.
The Soyuz-U rocket is equipped with four main engines on its first stage and one main engine on the second stage, which all fire simultaneously at liftoff. If the flight is nominal, the first stage of the rocket separates 118 seconds after the launch. This time however, one of the strap-on boosters apparently failed to develop full trust or shut down completely, causing the rocket to veer off course and crash.
Gorbunov said that his agency formed a special investigation commission, led by Nikolai Anfimov, Director of TsNIIMash, the main research institution at Rosaviacosmos, to determine precisely the cause of the failure. The Russian space forces, which operate the Plesetsk facility and conducted the latest launch, also investigate the accident.
According to Gorbunov, no other launches of the Soyuz-U rocket would take place until the commission thoroughly investigates the matter. "This is a rule, established since Korolev's time," Gorbunov said. (In the 1950s, Sergei Korolev led the development of the rocket booster, which became a base for the Soyuz-U family of rockets.)
RKK Energia, a Russian company, which is scheduled to launch a manned Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS on Oct. 28, confirmed that these plans were on hold pending the investigation of the Plesetsk failure. "We might delay the launch for a couple of days until the analysis shows what happened in Plesetsk," said Yuri Grigoriev, Deputy Designer General at RKK Energia.
The Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft, which will serve as a rescue vehicle for the permanent crew of the ISS, would ride the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle to reach the orbit.
Except for the improved fuel-injection system used in the engines of the Soyuz-FG, the rocket is identical to the Soyuz-U vehicle, which crashed in Plesetsk. However, Russian officials emphasized that launchers assigned for manned missions undergo much more rigorous certification and inspections during the assembly and processing than all other rockets.
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