Crewmembers of the new expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques, expressed their confidence in the reliability of the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft and the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle, during a news conference in Zvyozdny Gorodok on Thursday, TASS reports.
"The Soyuz spacecraft is very reliable and safe. In case of emergency, there is always a chance, which gives (us) confidence," Saint-Jacques noted.
McClain also said that she trusts the rocket and is ready to fly. "We know that systems will fail, and so the importance is having redundant systems, and even twice-redundant systems," the NASA astronaut pointed out.
She added that the incident that happened with the Soyuz-FG rocket on October 11 was not a failure but a success. "Our friends came home, the systems worked," she emphasized.
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It will be the first manned space launch to the ISS after the October aborted launch of the Soyuz-FG rocket carrying the manned spacecraft Soyuz MS-10 with a crew of two, Roscosmos’s Alexei Ovchinin and NASA’s Nick Hague.
On November 1, a commission investigating the incident concluded that the accident was due to a malfunctioning stage separation sensor, damaged when the launch vehicle was assembled at the Baikonur space site.
