Hanging By The Single, Weak Thread That Is The Russian Soyuz

By ANN Special Correspondent Wes Oleszewski

At 9:00 EDT on the morning of Wednesday, August 24, 2011 the Progress M-12M vehicle lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on an unmanned supply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Boosted atop the Soyuz version of the basic R-7 rocket that has been flying from Baikonur since the late 1950s and has lofted such spacecraft as Sputnik, Vostok and most recently the manned Soyuz, the launch looked good- at least for the visible portions.

Once the booster shed its strap-ons and core stage, the “third stage” went to work and shortly thereafter commanded an engine shut-down due to “…an engine anomaly.” At that point the vehicle did not have the velocity needed to make any sort of orbit and it returned to earth in a ballistic arc. It impacted in a reportedly heavily wooded and remote part of the Altai Republic. Russian news outlets report that the resulting impact event rattled glass 100 Km away.

This event is very important because of a large number of extending factors most of which are rooted in the fact that, currently, with the Space Shuttle program ended, the only means of sending crews to the ISS is by way of the same basic booster that just failed. Plus the most heavily scheduled way for taking cargo and fuel to the ISS is by way of the Soyuz launch system. Russian Proton launch vehicles can be used, but the failure of a spacecraft to separate from the Proton last week has now grounded that launch vehicle. Reliance for ISS support was riding on the Soyuz launch system that, immediately following the Space Shuttle’s final flight, the Russians openly boasted as being so reliable that they welcomed the world to the “…Era of Soyuz…” In fact, the United States, by way of NASA is now dependent on the Soyuz system to not only send astronauts to the ISS, but to supply the station until an undefined date when selected “commercial” companies may be able to take over the job. That decision now leaves the ISS, a $100 billion asset, paid for largely with American tax dollars, without a redundant support system.

Aboard the Progress M-12M was 2,700 pounds of dry supply goods, 925 pounds of water, 110 pounds of oxygen and 2,049 pounds of propellant. The most critical part of the payload being the propellant which was scheduled for transfer to the ISS’s Zvezda service module. That, along with the M-12M’s own fuel and engines would have been used to “re-boost” the ISS on three different occasions- August 31, September 14 and October 19. Such re-boosts are required because the ISS is in an orbit where the forces of the earth still are able to impose tiny amounts of friction upon the football field sized space station causing its orbit to begin to degrade. Thus occasional re-boost firings are required to prevent the orbit from decaying. Now the M-12M Progress and the fuel it carried are simply gone. This does not mean that the station is in immediate danger of falling to earth. NASA reports that the engines on the Zvezda service module can be used for the re-boosts if needed. Those engines, however, are normally preserved- because each burn causes some degradation in the engine bells and with the Space Shuttle being gone, there is no way to replace that hardware. There was a suggestion that the Progress M-11M, that has been docked at the ISS since June, could be called upon to do the re-boosts. Unfortunately, the M-11M Progress was undocked and positioned for de-orbit in order to make room for the Progress M-12M which is now a smoldering crater in the Altai Republic. Thus the M-11M Progress is probably not capable of re-rendezvous and re-boost duty. ATV supply ships can do some of the resupply, the next one being due in early March of 2012, but cannot do the re-boost duties.

Other consumables aboard the ISS can last about a year without resupply flights and the only large issue is likely to be refuse disposal. Each Progress not only brings up tons of supplies, but also carries away tons of refuse which subsequently burn up as the Progress de-orbits into the upper atmosphere. There are, in fact, very few places on ISS to stow trash and so items of refuse can quickly pile up. Next to re-boost, the greatest limitation on an un-resupplied ISS crew is said by NASA to be the “potty materials.”

Crew rotation on the ISS depends completely on the Soyuz launch system. The Progress M-12M cargo vehicle was boosted by a Soyuz-U booster while the manned version is sent into orbit on the Soyuz-FG booster. Both launch vehicles use similar third stages and thus a major failure of that stage such as took place on the M-12M mission will likely cause all of those boosters to be halted until the cause is found. Of course the crews that are currently working aboard the ISS are not stranded. Since the issue is in the booster and not in the Soyuz reentry module, the crews can return to the earth.

With this failure following so closely the Proton vehicle’s failure and in light of two recent ballistic, but survivable reentries of Soyuz capsules, brings another web of failures to mind. The question must be asked, does this demonstrate a shortcoming in the industrial base of Russian space manufacturing itself? Additionally, how does this demonstrate the failure of United States spaceflight planning and the politically appointed leadership of NASA? After all, it was they who put the US space program into this position where we are now totally dependent on the Russians to get to us to the ISS. Perhaps the most important question is, why did these same leaders allow the $100 billion asset that is the ISS to be left hanging by the single, weak thread that is the Russian Soyuz?

What is happening now with the Russian space launch hardware clearly demonstrates the failure of our current leadership in the United States. For the first time in a half century, critical and expensive events are going astray in space with American tax dollars at risk and we Americans can do nothing other than watch.

When the US Congress comes back into session we can expect plenty of political hay to sprout from the ground augured by the Progress M-12M vehicle.

FMI: www.nasa.gov