A Rocket Malfunctions After Takeoff and US and Russian Astronauts Live to Tell the Tale
Source – Two astronauts are alive after dramatically aborting their voyage to the International Space Station when their Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned while it carried them into orbit at 4,970mph.
American Nick Hague and Russian Aleksey Ovchinin were forced to abort their mission on the cusp of space, at an altitude of approximately 50km (164,000ft).
They landed safely in Kazakhstan after a ‘ballistic re-entry’, during which they experienced forces of up to 7G.
Video footage from the launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome shows a large plume of smoke coming from the rocket at the moment it failed and footage from inside the capsule shows the two astronauts being violently shaken about. …
A spokesperson for NASA said that rescue teams have now reached Hague and Ovchinin and they’ve been taken out of the capsule and were in ‘good condition’.
Sweet Jesus. Did these two just instantly become the Most Interesting Men in the World or what? With all due respect, if they had made it into orbit and were already settling into their six month mission on the International Space Station, none of us would even know about it. Someone’s up there right now and I defy anyone to tell me their names or where they’re from. Hell, none of us had heard of Scott Kelly until he committed the hate crime of Tweeting a quote from noted genocidal maniac Winston Churchill. Unless the ISS sends down some cool hurricane photo or the live camera inadvertently captures some UFO footage, no one cares. Low Earth orbit is boring. It’s experiments on plants or crystals and the effects of weightlessness. Been there, been bored by that. Wake us up when you’re heading to Mars or launching a ragtag bunch of misfit oil well drillers to nuke an asteroid into space gravel.
But this? This is totally badass. Having your rocket explode and then walking away from the crash is some real Captain Kirk shit. Believe me, I would’ve wanted no part of being Nick Hague or Aleksey Ovchinin when they were getting tossed around in the capsule and seconds away from getting atomized into cloud vapor. And don’t even bother trying to wash out my flight suit. Just put in a ziplock bag and throw it out, thanks. But how great would it be to walk in their space shoes right about now? To walk into a bar telling the tale of how you survived a rocket crash? The free drinks alone would be worth the minutes of stark raving 7G-force terror. But even more, the rest of your life will be Ground Control to Major Pussy.
So way to go, rocketmen. You just made space travel interesting again.