Soyuz MS-28: A Clean Launch, a Broken Pad, and a Fragile Lifeline to Orbit

Soyuz MS-28 Launch // Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

A textbook ascent with a hidden problem

On 27 November 2025, a Soyuz-2.1a rocket lofted the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft from Site 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Mikaev and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov to the International Space Station (ISS). The ascent was nominal, rendezvous was on time, and the crew docked safely a little over three hours after liftoff.

But as the plume cleared and cameras lingered on the pad, it became clear that Baikonur – and Russia’s only crew-capable launch complex – had not come through unscathed.

High-angle imagery from the official broadcast and post-launch photos show a large gray structure lying crumpled in the flame trench beneath the pad: the mobile service platform, also described as the “service cabin” or “maintenance cabin,” which normally sits tucked just beneath the pad deck and slides clear before ignition.

What actually broke off?

The structure that failed is not cosmetic hardware – it is a critical part of the Soyuz ground system.

The mobile service platform beneath Site 31 is a multi-story structure that:

• Houses cabling, sensors, and fluid lines serving the base of the rocket

• Provides work access to the first and second stages

• Interfaces with systems that secure the vehicle on the pad up to the final moments before liftoff

In normal operations, this cabin retracts sideways and is shielded from the bulk of the exhaust. In the MS-28 footage and aftermath imagery, that entire module appears to have been torn from its rails and dropped into the flame trench, charred and twisted.

Roscosmos has formally confirmed “damage to a number of elements of the launch pad,” while stressing that spare parts exist and repairs will be “eliminated in the near future.”

Independent analysts and Russian space journalists, however, describe the event more starkly: a collapse of the service cabin caused by either incomplete retraction or structural failure under exhaust loads, with the platform now resting where no part of the pad is supposed to be – directly in the flame trench.

A single point of failure for Russia’s crewed access to space

The structural damage would be serious at any launch site, but Site 31 has a unique vulnerability: it is currently Russia’s only pad certified for crewed Soyuz missions.

Baikonur’s historic “Gagarin’s Start” (Site 1/5) hosted Yuri Gagarin and decades of Soyuz flights but was taken out of crew rotation in 2019 and has not been reactivated for modern Soyuz-2 variants. As a result, all current crewed launches have been funneled through Site 31.

With the mobile service platform heavily damaged and other pad elements under inspection, this incident effectively exposes a single-point failure in Russia’s human-spaceflight infrastructure:

• No alternate crew pad at Baikonur is flight-ready for Soyuz-2 crew missions.

• Vostochny Cosmodrome does not yet support crewed Soyuz flights.

• Any stand-down at Site 31 directly threatens Russia’s ability to launch its own crews – and its NASA partners – to the ISS.

Some independent assessments suggest repairs could be lengthy, even on the scale of many months to a couple of years, depending on how much structure must be rebuilt and requalified. That stands in contrast to Roscosmos’ public assurances that repairs will be rapid.

Near-term consequences: ISS logistics and crew rotation

Operationally, the first question is simple: what happens to the next launches on the Baikonur manifest?

Before the incident, the next major mission from Site 31 was the Progress MS-33 cargo flight, planned for late December, followed by future Soyuz crew rotations in 2026. With the pad’s under-deck infrastructure damaged, all of those dates are now uncertain.

For the ISS program, the implications break down into several layers:

• Seat exchange and redundancy: NASA and Roscosmos maintain a seat-swap arrangement so that at least one NASA astronaut flies on Soyuz and one Russian cosmonaut flies on US commercial crew vehicles, preserving program continuity if either side loses access. Soyuz MS-28, with NASA astronaut Chris Williams aboard, is part of that strategy. A prolonged outage of the Soyuz crew pad would put more pressure on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon (and eventually Starliner) as the primary US-Russian transportation system for the ISS.

• ISS staffing and contingency margins: If future Soyuz flights slip significantly, it constrains the ability to rotate Russian crew on schedule, complicates planning for spacewalks, and reduces flexibility to respond to spacecraft or system anomalies on orbit. The ISS partnership has already experienced similar stress during Dragon and Starliner delays; repeating that scenario on the Russian side narrows the margin for error.

• Cargo cadence: Progress cargo missions are the backbone of Russian resupply and reboost capability. Any disruption to Progress launches can force partners to lean more on US commercial cargo vehicles for propellant, supplies, and station maintenance – and could drive changes in attitude control and orbit-raising strategies in the near term.

  
  

For now, the crew of Soyuz MS-28 is safe on orbit, and the ISS continues normal operations. But each week that Site 31 remains partially disabled erodes the margin that planners rely on to keep a multi-national station continuously crewed.

Technical lessons: aging hardware and procedural risk

From a technical perspective, the most sobering element of this incident is that it appears to be a ground systems failure during a completely nominal launch. The rocket did what it was supposed to do. The pad did not.

Early outside analyses point to several broad possibilities:

• Incomplete or mis-timed retraction of the service cabin

• Structural fatigue or corrosion in rails, supports, or locking mechanisms

• Blast-shield or trench modifications that changed how exhaust loads coupled into the structure

Until Roscosmos releases a formal root-cause report, these remain informed hypotheses. But the failure mode fits a pattern seen at multiple older launch facilities worldwide: concrete spalling, corroded steel, and legacy mechanisms being pushed far beyond their original design lifetimes.

For Russia, the stakes are particularly high. Soyuz has built its reputation on reliability and routine, often serving as the “backup” when other systems stumble. A pad-side structural failure that could have compromised a crewed mission – had the cabin torn loose earlier or in a different direction – chips away at that image and underscores the need for aggressive infrastructure modernization.

Strategic implications: pressure on Vostochny and the post-ISS era

Beyond immediate repairs, the Baikonur incident touches on longer-term strategic questions:

• Acceleration pressure for Vostochny: Russia has long planned to shift more launches, including eventual crewed flights, to the newer Vostochny Cosmodrome on its own territory. But crew certification has lagged, and Soyuz MS-28’s launch from Baikonur shows that Russia still depends on a leased facility in Kazakhstan for human spaceflight. A clearly damaged, single-point-of-failure pad will likely add political and financial urgency to completing crew-capable infrastructure at Vostochny.

• Negotiating leverage in ISS and beyond: If Russia’s ability to launch its own crews is constrained, it risks weakening its negotiating position in both ISS extension talks and any successor low-Earth orbit platforms. Dependence on US vehicles for Russian crew access would invert the dynamic of the 2010s, when NASA relied entirely on Soyuz.

• Signal for future programs: Any future Russian crewed spacecraft – whether modernized Soyuz variants or next-generation vehicles – will need a robust ground segment. The MS-28 pad failure is now a case study in why those investments cannot be deferred indefinitely.

On paper, Soyuz MS-28 is a success: a crew safely delivered, a spacecraft performing as designed, and a station continuing its mission. But the images from Baikonur tell a more complicated story: an aging launch complex, a critical service structure broken off and lying in the trench, and a spacefaring nation suddenly confronting just how narrow its path to orbit has become.

For international partners watching from Houston, TsUP, and beyond, the message is clear. Redundancy on paper is not enough; the hardware that underpins human spaceflight – the trenches, cabling rooms, and sliding platforms as much as the rockets themselves – must be treated as mission-critical assets.

Soyuz has weathered decades of political and technical turbulence. The question now is whether Russia can move quickly enough to repair, modernize, and diversify its crewed launch infrastructure before this incident transitions from an alarming close call into a sustained constraint on how – and how often – humans can reach orbit from Baikonur.