A Short Flight Escaped

As it had one morning last week, the radio news I listen to on the way to work led off with a science-related piece. A Soyuz capsule not getting into orbit, though, is a different sort of story than a Canadian scientist sharing a Nobel Prize. By the time the piece was over, though, I'd heard the cosmonaut and astronaut in the capsule had made it through a high-deceleration ballistic descent, so all of a sudden I wasn't troubled the way I had been on hearing about a Falcon 9 rocket exploding even with nobody on top of it then. There was sort of the feeling "of course they have escape rockets; things would have been much riskier in a space shuttle." Later in the day, though, I did happen to see a report the rocket problem had happened right after the escape rocket had jettisoned (along with the booster rockets, which I'd always associated with "one less danger to deal with"), and the escape had been handled with ordinary thrusters. I do understand, of course, that there's no other spacecraft ready and able to get people to the space station until this problem has been investigated, but for today that doesn't feel like a crisis yet.