Scary stuff happened on the way to space this morning, the Soyuz MS-10 with two astronauts aboard had a booster failure right around the stage seperation of the boosters and had to abort the launch on a ballistic trajectory. The two crew are safe and landed about 400km NE of the launch site.



https://twitter.com/Cruel_Coppinger/...321024/photo/1

What's interesting is this (from a comment from this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comme...and_are_now/):

Okay, now to the worst part:

Only one Soyuz is docked to the ISS right now, and the Soyuz spacecraft has an orbital time of 200 days. It was launched in June, therefore its 200 days end in December. Next Soyuz launch will most likely be delayed for a few months so the crew has a choice:

1) throw empty Souyz away because it exceeded its orbital time and live in the ISS without possibility of emergency evacuation for a few months

2) go home in 2 months leave the ISS empty

Option 1) is too dangerous and neither NASA nor Roscosmos is going to take the risk. So most likely the ISS will be empty for the first time in 17 years.