Soyuz 7K-ST No. 16L (sometimes known as Soyuz T-10a or T-10-1) was an unsuccessful Soyuz mission intended to visit the Salyut 7 space station, which was occupied by the Soyuz T-9 crew.
It was set to launch atop a Soyuz-U rocket on September 26, 1983. However, prior to launch, the rocket caught fire on its launch pad at Site 1/5, Baikonur Cosmodrome. The launch escape system of the Soyuz spacecraft fired two seconds before the launch vehicle exploded, saving the crew of commander Vladimir G. Titov and flight engineer Gennadi Strekalov. It is so far the only case in which a launch escape system has been fired with a crew aboard.
The mission was a visiting expedition to Salyut 7. The crew was scheduled to return in Soyuz T-9, leaving Soyuz T-10 for the crew on the space station to return in later. The failure briefly led to speculation in the West that the crew of Soyuz T-9 may be stranded on the space station, but this was never the case. That crew would return to Earth as normal on November 23, 1983, aboard Soyuz T-9.
Next scheduled launch
For a full schedule of launches and deep-space rendezvous, see 2024 in spaceflight.
She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, the only person to participate on both.
Ride died following a 17-month-long battle with pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012. Shortly before her death, she came out as a homosexual in a statement through her philanthropic enterprise, Sally Ride Science.
Selected picture
A transit of Earth by the Moon, as photographed by the Deep Space Climate Observatory from the Sun-Earth L1Lagrangian point. This animation was compiled from a set of 60 frames—20 distinct images, each compiled from monochrome images taken in red, green and blue filters—taken over the course of five hours on July 16, 2015. Each monochrome frame was taken every 30 seconds. Due to the speed of the Moon's motion, this results in a slight green shift in some frames of the animation.