Report on Soyuz-FG vehicle malfunction to be approved on 30 October

A final report and list of recommendations will be approved on October 30, following the probe into the incident with the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle carrying Soyuz MS-10 manned spacecraft, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said after a meeting of the emergency commission.

"Having listened to reports of the experts investigating causes of the emergency, members of the emergency commission have approved, after a detailed examination, a draft report on causes of the incident and begun drawing up recommendations to prevent similar situations in the future," the statement says.

"The final report and list of recommendations for the space industry enterprises will be approved on October 30, 2018 and will be submitted to chairperson of the State Commission for Flight Tests of Manned Space Complexes," it says.

A Soyuz-FG carrier rocket with a manned Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft blasted off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station (ISS) on October 11. On board the spacecraft were Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin (the commander of the Soyuz MS-10) and NASA astronaut Nick Hague.

Following a smooth liftoff, the Soyuz’s booster malfunctioned between the first and second stages of separating, whereupon the crew was forced to abort the flight and switch to ballistic descent. The manned Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft ended up landing in the Kazakh steppe. The Soyuz MS-10 crew were not hurt.

This is the first emergency landing with this type of carrier rocket over the past 35 years.

Earlier, TASS reported citing a source in the space industry that the state commission looking into the causes of the Soyuz-FG malfunction said that signal failure might have occurred at the moment of separation of the first and second stages of the Soyuz-FG rocket, which triggered the safety system that aborted the launch. Soyuz-FG launch vehicles are equipped with flight controllers made in Ukraine, whereas Russian-made systems are installed on Soyuz-2 carrier rockets.