KOROLYOV /Moscow Region/, October 16. /TASS/. Only three launches of the manned spacecraft Soyuz in history resulted in emergencies since 1960s, the deputy chief designer of new space systems at the space rocket corporation Energia, Igor Khamits, told the media on Tuesday.
"The Soyuz spacecraft were developed in the 1960s to replace the Vostok family. It was a third case [of an emergency while trying to launch a manned Soyuz] in history. The previous incident was 35 years ago. Some had occurred before that," Khamits said.
"We had an emergency at the initial phase, when the rocket caught fire at the launch pad. The emergency rescue system was activated. Also, there was an incident in one of the last phases of the flight. And the latest occurred in the middle of the flight," he said.
Starting from the 1960s there have been more than 160 unmanned and manned launches of the Soyuz spacecraft. The space rocket corporation Energia created the emergency rescue system in the 1960s alongside the manned Soyuz spacecraft.
A Soyuz-FG rocket carrying the manned spacecraft Soyuz MS-10 failed shortly after blasting off from the Baikonur space site on October 11. It was to take to the ISS Roscosmos’s Alexei Ovchinin (the Soyuz MS-10 commander) and NASA’s Nick Hague. The crew had a safe emergency landing. Both crew were first taken to the city of Baikonur. On October 12, they were flown to Moscow. An inquiry is underway.