Soyuz Rocket Launch Failure Forces Emergency Landing for US-Russian Space Station Crew

The Soyuz booster is quite reliable, but space launch is a necessarily sporty endeavor. So it’s unfortunate bu not terribly surprising that something went wrong with todays launch. Fortunately the launch abort and recovery systems worked and the crew were safely landed. The incident occurs at about 2:45 in the video below; not clear what happened, looks like perhaps a strap-on booster underwent a flawed separation. Perhaps it impacted the core.

While I remain a fan of the Space BFR in principle, incidents like this do give me a bit of pause. In the event of a booster failure, a Soyuz/Apollo-type of system (even an SLS/Orion-type system) stands a good chance of safely separating the crew capsule, because the crew capsule is a small, dense, easily-boosted nugget. With the BFR, if something goes unintentionally energetic with the booster, accelerating the whole manned interplanetary transporter stage away fast enough would be… well, damned impressive. The answer, of course, is to make the whole BFR system so reliable that separating the passengers in the event of an emergency would seem as silly as separating the passengers from a jetliner in the event a wing fell off in flight. Given the sheer power and energy involved with space launch, that’s *always* going to be more dangerous than airliners, so the level of acceptable risk for space travelers will always have to be higher than it is for air travelers.

Additional thought: with space launch, no matter how diligent you are, things can just go wrong. But with holes being drilled into capsule and patched up with spackle by either malicious or delinquent workers, the suspicion that someone did something intentional to this booster will be inevitable.