Soyuz

Arianespace stated on 2018-10-11 that it is too soon to determine whether Soyuz-ST rockets used to launch satellites from South America will be grounded following the Soyuz-FG failure.

NASA will seek options to avoid de-crewing the International Space Station, which would occur if the current crew left aboard Soyuz MS-09 before Soyuz flights resumed.

Four additional Arianespace customers with Soyuz missions scheduled 2018 or next include OneWeb, OneWeb’s base in the Channel Islands, SES of Luxembourg, the Italian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency.

Soyuz 10-1, a 1983 mission to the Salyut 7 space station, used its launch escape tower on the pad after a fire broke out 48 seconds before launch and the tower activated two seconds before the rocket exploded.

The Soyuz-FG has been transporting crews to the International Space Station since coming into service in 2001 and conducted 55 successful flights in 17 years.

Arianespace continued preparations on 2018-10-11 at Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana for a planned November Soyuz-ST launch carrying a European weather satellite despite the Soyuz booster failure earlier that day.

Arianespace has been launching Soyuz rockets from the Guiana Space Centre since 2011.

Soyuz 18-1 executed the first recorded launch escape maneuver in 1975 during a mission to the Salyut 4 space station.

The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:40 a.m. Eastern on 2018-10-11.

SES planned a final first-generation Soyuz launch of four O3b satellites in 2019, completing the 16 O3b satellites that launched on Soyuz four at a time.

Arianespace operates Soyuz vehicles from the Guiana Space Centre alongside European Ariane 5 and Vega rockets.

OneWeb purchased 21 Soyuz missions from Arianespace to carry between 690 and 720 satellites to low Earth orbit.

The current International Space Station crew can return to Earth using the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft docked to the station.

The Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft launched to the ISS on 2018-06-06, which places its approximately 200-day lifetime limit in late December.

The Soyuz MS-10 mission was aborted minutes after liftoff and did not reach the International Space Station.

Arianespace-operated Soyuz launches previously supported medium Earth orbit missions for the European Commission’s Galileo navigation satellites and SES’s O3b telecom fleet.

In the prior year, Arianespace used Soyuz for two missions to geostationary transfer orbit.

Astroscale Japan Inc. contracted Glavkosmos/GK Launch Services to launch the ELSA-d mission on a Soyuz-2 cluster mission from Baikonur Cosmodrome in early 2020.