astronomy

Soyuz MS-10

Soyuz MS-10 is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Soyuz MS-10 rather than just read about it. In short: Soyuz MS-10 was a crewed Soyuz MS spaceflight that aborted shortly after launch on 11 October 2018 due to a failure of the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle boosters. MS-10 was the 139th flight of a Soyuz spacecraft.

Key takeaways

Soyuz MS-10 belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Soyuz MS-10 to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Soyuz MS-10 from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Soyuz MS-10 was a crewed Soyuz MS spaceflight that aborted shortly after launch on 11 October 2018 due to a failure of the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle boosters. MS-10 was the 139th flight of a Soyuz spacecraft. It was intended to transport two members of the Expedition 57 crew to the International Space Station.

History A few minutes after liftoff, the craft went into contingency abort due to a booster failure and had to return to Earth. By the time the contingency abort was declared, the launch escape system (LES) tower had already been ejected and the capsule was pulled away from the rocket using the solid rocket jettison motors on the capsule fairing. Both crew members, Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, were recovered in good health. The MS-10 flight abort was the first instance of a Russian crewed booster accident in 35 years, since Soyuz T-10-1 exploded on the launch pad in September 1983. On 1 November 2018, Russian scientists released a video recording of the mission.

Crew

Mission

A few minutes after liftoff, which took place at 08:40 UTC, the crew reported feeling weightless, and mission control declared a booster had failed. According to Sergei Krikalev of Roscosmos, the primary cause of the failure was a collision that occurred during the separation of the carrier rocket's first and second stages. "A deviation from the standard trajectory occurred and apparently the lower part of the second stage disintegrated," he said. Shortly after, a contingency was declared and the spacecraft carrying the crew performed an emergency separation, returning to Earth in a ballistic trajectory, during which the crew experienced "about six to seven times Earth's gravity" followed by a successful landing. The abort occurred at an altitude of approximately 50 kilometres (31 miles); the spacecraft reached an apogee of 93 km (58 mi) then landed 19 minutes and 41 seconds after launch. At 08:55 UTC the search and rescue team was deployed to recover the crew and the spacecraft, which had landed 402 kilometres (250 mi) from the launch site and 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of Jezkazgan, Kazakhstan.

Approximately 25 minutes after the search and rescue team took off, NASA announced they were in contact with Ovchinin and Hague. NASA TV broadcast photographs of the crew undergoing medical tests and apparently healthy at Jezkazgan Airport at 12:04 UTC. The crew flew to the Baikonur Cosmodrome to meet their families before leaving for Moscow.

Aftermath Following the aborted spaceflight, the Russian government announced that crewed Soyuz launches would be temporarily suspended. Roscosmos ordered a full state commission to investigate the incident, and the BBC reported that a criminal investigation was also expected. A few weeks prior to the failed launch, another investigation had commenced into how a hole came to be drilled into the wall of the Soyuz MS-09 capsule that was then docked at the International Space Station. After collecting the debris of the rocket, the Soyuz MS-10 commission started the investigation on 15 October 2018. Initially a faulty cable connecting to the first stage booster was suspected, but by 17 October 2018 the commission was concentrating on the manufacturing sequence of the Soyuz rocket, and set the investigation deadline to 21 October 2018. By 18 October 2018, the failure to correctly mate the first stage booster with the first stage core was identified as the likely cause of the flight abort. The side booster was likely damaged and re-contacted the core during stage separation. On 22 October 2018, the investigation deadline was extended to 30 October 2018, with a preliminary report tentatively blaming a damaged separation sensor failing to activate the separation motor of one of the side boosters, similar to an uncrewed flight failure in 1986. The commission report was provided on 31 October 2018, concluding that a ball joint supporting the errant side booster was deformed during assembly, preventing proper separation of the side booster, while the sensor and separation motor had worked properly. After the investigation identified an assembly error that would require no material change to the Soyuz-FG configuration, the next crewed Soyuz flight (MS-11) was scheduled for 3 December 2018. Within a day of the incident Dmitry Rogozin, chief of Roscosmos, said that Ovchinin and Hague would fly again in early 2019. In December 2018, it was announced that Ovchinin and Hague would fly on Soyuz MS-12 as part of Expedition 59/60 with Ovchinin serving as commander of Expedition 60. MS-12 launched successfully on 14 March 2019, achieving the mission that MS-10 had failed. The MS-10 descent module was installed outside of Roscosmos headquarters. It was unveiled 2 December 2019. Soyuz MS-10 was one of six Soyuz missions studied in a 2021 research paper looking into potential environmental damage caused by failed rocket launches. The rocket propellants of MS-10 were not found to have caused significant soil pollution at its crash sites.

Illustrations

Soyuz MS-10: Launch vehicle, plume from escape tower, 4 boosters, and debris after separation — Launch vehicle, plume from escape tower, 4 boosters, and debris after separation

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Soyuz MS-10

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Soyuz MS-10 claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Soyuz MS-10 before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Soyuz MS-10 ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Soyuz MS-10

In research: Soyuz MS-10 appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Soyuz MS-10 in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Soyuz MS-10 is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2018 disasters in Kazakhstan, 2018 in Russia, Crewed Soyuz missions, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Soyuz MS-10 outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Soyuz MS-10 in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Soyuz MS-10 means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Soyuz MS-10 out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Soyuz MS-10 in simple terms?

Why does Soyuz MS-10 matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Soyuz MS-10?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Soyuz MS-10.