The takeoff of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft is canceled at the last minute

Moscow. The takeoff of a Russian Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft, with three crew members and bound for the International Space Station (ISS), was canceled this Thursday on the edgeannounced the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

This is a new setback for the Russian space sector, which has been suffering for years from funding problems, corruption scandals and failures, such as the loss in August 2023 of the Luna-25 lunar probe.

The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft was about to take off this Thursday at 13:21 GMT (16:21 in Moscow) when the cancellation was announced.

The crew consisted of NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, veteran Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitski and Marina Vasilevskaia, the first Belarusian cosmonaut.

“There was an automatic cancellation of the launch,” the flight controller said in a live broadcast broadcast by Roscosmos, seconds before the spacecraft took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The NASA commentator, who was also broadcasting the launch live, indicated that “the engine sequence normally expected at that time did not start,” twenty seconds before takeoff.

“The automatic order was issued to abort the countdown, ending the launch,” he added.

According to him, “engineers are already on the launch pad to evaluate what could have triggered the outage,” but the exact cause is still unknown. “The crew is safe aboard the Soyuz vehicle.”

NASA indicated that the next possible launch date is March 23.

Series of setbacks

The Russian space sector, historically the pride of the country, has been suffering several embarrassing setbacks in recent years.

Three Russian spacecraft docked to their ISS segment have suffered coolant leaks in recent months. In August, the first Russian probe sent to the Moon since the times of the USSR crashed on the lunar soil.

These failures have not stopped the ambitions of Moscow, which wants to end its participation in the ISS after 2024 to focus on the construction of its own space station.

The Russian space sector is also limited by its lack of innovation, as most of its systems are based on Soviet technologies that are generally reliable but becoming outdated.

For a long time, Soyuz spacecraft were the only means of reaching the ISS, but Roscosmos has faced competition in recent years from private companies such as billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Russian-Western cooperation in the space sector was also undermined by the Russian offensive against Ukraine, launched in February 2022, and the sanctions that followed.

The International Space Station is one of the few remaining areas of cooperation between Russia and the United States.

The Soyuz spacecraft, whose takeoff was aborted this Thursday, was to dock with the Prichal module, in turn docked with the Nauka module docked to the Russian segment of the ISS.