BAIKONUR COSMODROME, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - A Russian cosmonaut and a U.S. astronaut were safe on Thursday after a Soyuz rocket bound for the International Space Station failed in mid-air two minutes after liftoff in Kazakhstan, leading to a dramatic emergency landing.

The two-man crew, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin and American Nick Hague, landed unharmed on the Kazakh desert steppe as rescue crews raced to reach them, according to the U.S. space agency NASA and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos.

The mishap occurred as the first and second stages of a Russian booster rocket separated shortly after the launch from Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era cosmodrome of Baikonur.

The Soyuz capsule carrying Ovchinin and Hague separated from the malfunctioning Russian rocket and plunged 31 miles (50 km) down to the surface, with parachutes helping to slow its speed, NASA said. A cloud of sand billowed up as the capsule landed after what NASA called a 34-minute steep ballistic descent.

Video from inside the capsule showed the two men being shaken around at the moment the failure occurred, with their arms and legs flailing. Ovchinin can be heard saying, “That was a quick flight.”

Photographs released by Roscosmos after the rescue showed the two men smiling and relaxing on sofas at a town near their landing site as they underwent medical tests. A photograph posted on Twitter by NASA showed Ovchinin and Hague embracing their families after being transported back to the Baikonur site.

Rescue crews raced to the scene to retrieve them from their landing spot, including paratroopers, helicopters and all-terrain vehicles, NASA said.

NASA has relied on Russian rockets to ferry astronauts to the space station since the United States retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, although the agency has announced plans for a test flight carrying two astronauts on a SpaceX commercial rocket next April.

Space is an area of cooperation between the United States and Russia at a time of fraught relations. Asked about the mishap, President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House he was “not worried” that American astronauts have to rely on Russia to get into space.

Thursday’s mishap was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launchpad explosion.

‘CREW HAS BEEN SAVED’

Moscow immediately suspended all manned space launches, the RIA news agency reported, while Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said he ordered a state commission to be created to investigate what went wrong. Russia’s Investigative Committee said it opened a criminal investigation into the matter.

“Rescue services have been working since the first second of the accident,” Rogozin wrote on Twitter. “The emergency rescue systems of the MS-Soyuz spacecraft worked smoothly. The crew has been saved.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the most important thing was that the two men were alive.

A view shows the Soyuz capsule transporting U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin, after it made an emergency landing following a failure of its booster rockets, near the city of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan October 11, 2018. Federal Air Transport Agency "Rosaviation"/Handout via REUTERS.

The space station’s next re-supply mission had been scheduled for late October from Baikonur, but the new investigation may delay it.

NASA officials now must decide how or whether to maintain a U.S. presence on the $100 billion orbital research laboratory.

“The fact that this crew didn’t get to orbit, we feel bad for them. But we have confidence that our Russian colleagues will figure out what’s going on and we’ll hopefully see Nick and Alexei in orbit at the space station soon,” said Kenny Todd, NASA’s International Space Station operations integration manager.

Hague and Ovchinin were set to join the station’s current three-member crew, which includes American Serena Aunon-Chancellor.

“We have a lot of things planned through the rest of the fall and the winter, and that’s all just being reassessed right now,” Sam Scimemi, NASA’s director for the International Space Station, told Reuters. “We have resources well into next year for this crew, so there’s no concern about resources on board.”

Interfax quoted a source as saying the crash meant the three people aboard the space station - a German and a Russian in addition to the American - would be stuck there at least until January. They were due to return to Earth in December.

Unmanned launches of Soyuz rockets might also be suspended, Interfax said.

Visiting Kazakhstan for the first time as NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine witnessed Thursday’s launch and promised a “thorough investigation” into the mishap.

Slideshow (17 Images)

“I’m grateful that everyone is safe,” Bridenstine said in a statement.

Questions are now likely to be asked about Russia’s space program. In August, a hole appeared in a Soyuz capsule docked to the ISS that caused a brief loss of air pressure and had to be patched. Rogozin has said it could have been made deliberately by someone during manufacturing or while the craft was in space.

Last November, Roscosmos lost contact with a newly launched weather satellite after it blasted off from Russia’s new Vostochny cosmodrome in the Far East.</s>A Soyuz rocket booster failed during the launch of a capsule carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin Thursday, forcing officials to abort their mission. The capsule made a "ballistic landing" and rescue teams recovered the pair, who are reportedly in "good condition," NASA says.

Hague and Ovchinin launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:40 a.m. ET, heading to join the crew of the International Space Station. But more than a minute after launch, their Soyuz MS-10's booster failed.

Search and recovery teams had been predeployed to areas beneath the possible flight path. Helicopters were able to reach Haig and Ovchinin fairly quickly and extract them from the capsule. They then started the process of flying back to Baikonur.

A NASA TV commentator at Mission Control in Houston describes a ballistic descent or landing this way: "That means it comes in at a sharper angle to land than we normally land at. And that means that the crew inside experiences higher G-force loads as they go through the landing."

"That is a landing mode we've seen before," the commentator said.

A recording of communications between the space station and NASA stated that Hague and Ovchinin had experienced 6.7 G's — about the same as Apollo astronauts felt during reentry, according to Air and Space magazine.

"I'm grateful that everyone is safe. A thorough investigation into the cause of the incident will be conducted," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who was in Kazakhstan for the rocket launch.

The Roscosmos Space Agency says it is forming a state commission to investigate the aborted launch.

NASA says it chose Hague as an astronaut in 2013 and completed training in 2015; he had been scheduled to perform at least two spacewalks as part of his mission on the space station. He is a colonel in the Air Force.

Ovchinin was heading to space for the second time.

The two had been slate to join three crewmates on the ISS as part of Expedition 57. After a six</s>Expedition 57 crew members Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos (left) and Nick Hague of NASA (right) posed for pictures in front of their Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft.

MELBOURNE, Fla. – NASA and its partners in a few weeks will celebrate 18 years of uninterrupted human presence on the International Space Station, a remarkable achievement dating to the first long-duration crew’s arrival on Nov. 2, 2000.

But Thursday’s aborted launch by a Russian rocket – one that provides astronauts’ only ride to the station – raised the risk that crews might need to abandon the $100 billion laboratory complex early next year if the rocket issue isn’t resolved quickly.

The Soyuz spacecraft slated to take three Expedition 57 crew members home must depart the station by early January, unless officials waive the usual limits on how much time it can spend in orbit.

If a new crew doesn’t arrive before then, the station could be left empty for the first time in nearly two decades.

Oct. 12: US, Russian astronauts reach Russia after emergency landing following failed rocket launch to ISS

"To step away from having people permanently in space would be a huge psychological and technical blow,” said Wayne Hale, a space industry consultant and former manager of NASA’s shuttle program. “Uncrewing the station is something that’s been talked about and planned for, but it’s not really a good option.”

The Expedition One crew members are about to eat fresh fruit in the form of oranges on board the Zvezda Service Module of the Earth-orbiting International Space Station. Pictured, from the left, are cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko, Soyuz commander; astronaut William Shepherd, mission commander; and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, flight engineer.

So far, Russian officials say they expect quick results from an investigation into what went wrong with the Soyuz FG rocket that blasted off from Kazakhstan at 4:40 a.m. EDT Thursday with the Soyuz capsule carrying rookie NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin.

The pair survived unscathed, landing safely under parachutes after their capsule escaped from the rocket two minutes into the launch and flew a ballistic trajectory back to the ground. They flew back to Russia on Friday.

Early attention is focused on a separation problem with one of the rocket’s four first-stage boosters, which may have hit and damaged the second stage, causing its engines to shut down.

“It just reemphasizes that this is dangerous business,” said Reid Wiseman, NASA’s deputy chief astronaut. “It’s a good system, it’s a reliable system. I have complete confidence in the Russians and the quality of their work."

Expedition 56-57 crewmates (from left) Serena Auñón-Chancellor of NASA; Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency; and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos pose for a portrait aboard the International Space Station.

Before the mishap, the current station crew – NASA's Serena Auñón-Chancellor, Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos – was scheduled to return to Earth on Dec. 13, and another three-person crew was scheduled to launch Dec. 20. Keeping that schedule now would be remarkable.

The program might first fly a robotic Progress cargo craft, which uses a very similar rocket. It also might consider launching a Soyuz without anyone on board to give the station crew a fresh ride.

The Soyuz typically is limited to about 210 days in orbit because of a concern about degradation of hydrogen peroxide fuel in thrusters.

If astronauts do end up abandoning the station as soon as January, psychological blows aside, current and former space station managers say the space station could fly untended for a long time.

“I wouldn’t worry about it unless you plan on staying that way for over a year, and then I’d start to wring my hands a little bit,” said Mike Suffredini, a former NASA station program manager who now leads Axiom Space, a startup designing private stations. “Even if they have to bring the crew home because the Soyuz times out, they know how to do that, and the vehicle will be fine as long as you don’t have cascading failures in a single system.”

Ground teams control the station’s flight every day, so that wouldn’t change. The departing crew would shut down various systems before it left, including life support.

Suffredini said engineers would carefully study how to shut systems down properly so that they would turn back on when a crew returns.

Oct. 11: Astronauts in good condition after emergency landing, NASA says

Then there’s the nightmare scenario: Cascading failures cause the station to tumble. Spacecraft can’t dock with it. Solar arrays are no longer pointed properly. Batteries begin to die. The football field-length, nearly million-pound station begins an uncontrolled re-entry that could rain debris on populated areas.

“They’re going to be reluctant to evacuate the crew,” said Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut who lived on the station for more than five months in 2004-05. “I’m sure they’re taking a hard look how long they can keep the Soyuz up there.”

“Commercial crew” capsules that Boeing and SpaceX are developing for NASA won’t be ready to fly astronauts from Florida before next summer.

NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, formed after the Apollo 1 fire, already has expressed concern about rushing those vehicles into service, potentially compromising safety.

The Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Soyuz MS-10 space ship carrying a new crew to the International Space Station, ISS, flies in the sky at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. The Russian rocket carries U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. The two astronauts are making an emergency landing after a Russian booster rocket carrying them into orbit to the International Space Station has failed after launch. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

After the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew during re-entry in 2003, Russia’s Soyuz rockets and capsules allowed crews to reach the station and keep it running. They have done so again for more than seven years since NASA's final shuttle mission, but there’s no backup.

“With this issue now, it’s obvious that we no longer have that redundancy, at least until we start flying on a SpaceX or Boeing vehicle, hopefully sometime next year,” said Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who lived on the station for nearly a year in 2015-16. “We’ve lost that capability for a while. It’s a concern, absolutely.”

But Kelly has seen past Russian investigations move swiftly, including one into a Progress failure while he was living on the station. The Progress returned to flight just more than two months later.

So the prospect of an uncrewed station is for now a risk, but it’s difficult to say how likely.

“The Russians are pretty good at this,” Kelly said. “I would suspect that they’ll figure out what happened, put in some new safety measures and go launch as soon as possible, before that other Soyuz runs out of its life on orbit.”</s>A Soyuz rocket booster failed during the launch of a capsule carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin Thursday, forcing officials to abort their mission. The capsule made a "ballistic landing" and rescue teams recovered the pair, who are reportedly in "good condition," NASA says.

Hague and Ovchinin launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:40 a.m. ET, heading to join the crew of the International Space Station. But more than a minute after launch, their Soyuz MS-10's booster failed.

Search and recovery teams had been predeployed to areas beneath the possible flight path. Helicopters were able to reach Haig and Ovchinin fairly quickly and extract them from the capsule. They then started the process of flying back to Baikonur.

A NASA TV commentator at Mission Control in Houston describes a ballistic descent or landing this way: "That means it comes in at a sharper angle to land than we normally land at. And that means that the crew inside experiences higher G-force loads as they go through the landing."

"That is a landing mode we've seen before," the commentator said.

A recording of communications between the space station and NASA stated that Hague and Ovchinin had experienced 6.7 G's — about the same as Apollo astronauts felt during reentry, according to Air and Space magazine.

A photo posted by Russia's Roscosmos space agency shortly before launch showed Ovchinin and Hague awaiting launch in their capsule — ready to complete two weeks of intense preparations and final tests at the Baikonur launch site.

"I'm grateful that everyone is safe. A thorough investigation into the cause of the incident will be conducted," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who was in Kazakhstan for the rocket launch.

Roscosmos says it is forming a state commission to investigate the aborted launch.

NASA says it chose Hague as an astronaut in 2013 and completed training in 2015; he had been scheduled to perform at least two spacewalks as part of his mission on the space station. He is a colonel in the Air Force.

Ovchinin was heading to space for the second time, having previously served aboard the station.

The two had been slated to join three crewmates on the ISS as part of Expedition 57. The trip to the station was to take them about six hours.

The launch took place one week after three members of the ISS crew returned to Earth. Since then, the station has been operated by just three people: Commander Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, and Flight Engineers Serena Auñón-Chancellor of NASA and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos.</s>Russia has suspended its manned space program on Thursday until the investigation is pending into the rocket failure, ANI reported.

The suspension comes after earlier on Thursday a Russian Soyuz rocket, carrying two-man Russian-American crew, malfunctioned and made an emergency landing in Kazhakstan.

“Astronaut Nick Hague of NASA and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos launched at 4:40 a.m. Eastern time aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. There was an issue with the booster from today’s launch. The Soyuz capsule has landed back on Earth carrying two crew members. The crew are in good condition and in contact. Search and rescue teams are en route to the landing location and we await further updates,” said NASA in a statement.

“The Soyuz capsule is returning to Earth via a ballistic descent, which is a sharper angle of landing compared to normal. Search and rescue teams are heading towards the expected touchdown location of the spacecraft and crew,” tweeted NASA.

The rocket took off from Kazakhstan and was on its way to the International Space Station.</s>RUSSIA — Astronauts on board a Soyuz rocket heading to the International Space Station survived an emergency landing following a booster failure, a Russian space official said Thursday.

“The crew landed,” Dmitry Rogozin, director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said on Twitter. “All are alive.”

The rocket was transporting NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos for a six-month stay on the ISS.

NASA said its support teams had reached the location where the crew touched down.

“The search and rescue teams have reached the Soyuz spacecraft landing site and report that the two crew members are in good condition and are out of the capsule,” NASA tweeted.

The pair will be taken to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, outside the Russian capital, Moscow, NASA said.

Dramatic footage showed the capsule carrying the crew as it parachuted back to Earth before thumping down in a plume of dust in Kazakhstan, about 250 miles away from where it took off.

The rocket had launched minutes earlier, at 4:40 a.m. ET, from the country’s Baikonur Cosmodrome on a journey that was expected to involve four orbits of the Earth and take six hours.

The Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft was able to separate from the Soyuz-FG rocket booster after the issue emerged, NASA said, and began a ballistic descent.

A ballistic descent is a sharper angle of landing compared to normal, the space agency said. This means the spacecraft would have been traveling faster than usual as it approached Earth.

“I’m grateful that everyone is safe,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. “A thorough investigation into the cause of the incident will be conducted.”

Rogozin said Roscosmos was forming a state investigative commission to find out what went wrong. “Telemetry is being studied,” he said on Twitter. “Rescue services worked from the first second of the accident.”

The emergency rescue system on board the Soyuz “worked normally,” Rogozin added.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he expected Russian President Vladimir Putin would be briefed on the incident.

Hague, who only joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2013, was on his first space mission.

He and Ovchinin were due to join Expedition 57 Commander Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, NASA Flight Engineer Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Roscosmos Flight Engineer Sergey Prokopyev on the ISS. They arrived at the station in June.

The Expedition 57 crew members are working on hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science, according to NASA.</s>Smoke rise as the boosters of first stage of the Soyuz-FG rocket with Soyuz MS-10 space ship carrying a new crew to the International Space Station, ISS, separate after the launch at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. The Russian rocket carries U.S. astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. The two astronauts are making an emergency landing after a Russian booster rocket carrying them into orbit to the International Space Station has failed after launch. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky) (AP)</s>If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member . If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.

A Soyuz rocket poised to send two new crew members to the International Space Station rolled to its launch pad Tuesday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Soyuz-FG rocket emerged from an assembly building at the Central Asia spaceport at sunrise Tuesday. Lying on its side, the three-stage launcher rode a specially-designed rail bar to Launch Pad. No. 1 at Baikonur, a historic launch site used in 1961 on the flight of Yuri Gagarin, who became the first person to travel in space.

Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin will occupy the center seat when the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft lifts off at 0840 GMT (4:40 a.m. EDT) Thursday from Baikonur. He will be joined by NASA astronaut Nick Hague in the left seat of the Soyuz spacecraft.

After a nearly nine-minute climb into orbit, the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft will commence its chase of the International Space Station, with docking planned at 1444 GMT (10:44 a.m. EDT). The arrival of Ovchinin and Hague will raise the station’s crew complement to five.

The duo plans to stay on the space station until mid-April.

See our Mission Status Center for details and live coverage of the launch.</s>"It is impossible to draw any conclusions now. He [Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov] said that the relevant authorities would now work to figure out what had happened," Peskov told reporters.

According to Sergey Krikalev, the executive director of manned space programs at the Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos, the special commission investigating the cause of the Soyuz booster failure is expected to present its first findings in late October.

READ MORE: Soyuz MS-10 Crew Arrives at Chkalovsky Airport After Failed Launch (VIDEO)

Soyuz MS-14 May Be Reequipped for Manned Flight

Meanwhile, a space industry source told Sputnik that the Soyuz MS-14 unmanned spacecraft, which is expected to be launched in 2019, maybe re-equipped for manned flight following the Soyuz booster failure.

"Most likely, the Soyuz MS-14, which is scheduled to be launched in September 2019, will be re-equipped as an ordinary manned spacecraft," the source said.

The comment was made after on Thursday, an accident occurred during the liftoff of a Soyuz-FG launch vehicle carrying the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft with two new members of the ISS crew on board — Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague. The crew has safely returned to Earth in a jettisoned escape capsule.

UAE, US May Demand Compensation From Russia for Late Delivery of Astronauts

"The flight of an Arab astronaut will definitely move forward for about half a year. Other terms are written in the contract, which means we will incur some losses. It is not ruled out that they may demand compensation from us for not meeting the deadlines. Plus we did not deliver the American astronaut, and they paid for his flight. We lost the spacecraft and the rocket without fulfilling our commitment to NASA, so we will have to give them a new slot," he noted.

The source also said the flight of two Russian newbie cosmonauts to the ISS, previously slated for next fall, was expected to be delayed until 2020.

"An expedition with cosmonauts Tikhonov and Babkin, who have not flown yet, was planned for next fall. They will not fly at that time now because the UAE astronaut and, possibly, the American astronaut will most likely fly, while an experienced Russian cosmonaut will take the third slot," he said.

READ MORE: Soyuz MS-10 Launch to ISS from Baikonur Cosmodrome (VIDEO)

Earlier in the day, Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin stated that the flight of Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled for the next spring.</s>A Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut are in "good condition" after a booster rocket on their spacecraft failed and forced them to make an emergency landing Thursday.

The Soyuz MS-10 rocket took off at 4:40 a.m. local time on what was supposed to be a six-hour journey to the International Space Station. Instead, the rocket suffered a malfunction shortly after taking off from Russia's spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The spacecraft's two-man crew, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin, made an emergency landing in the craft's capsule in Kazakhstan. Rescue teams reached the landing site and confirmed that both men are alive and in "good condition," NASA wrote on .

"[Nick Hague] and Alexey Ovchinin are on helicopters, making their way back to Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Search & rescue teams report that they remain in good condition after a safe landing following an issue with their launch on a Soyuz earlier," NASA tweeted.

Russian state news agencies reported that the two men would be flown to the town of Zhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan to undergo medical examinations.

The head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, said that it was creating a state commission to investigate the cause of the crash, and deputy prime minister Yuri Borisov announced that Russia would be suspending manned flights until the incident could be reviewed.

The moment the boost rocket failed was captured on the live-feed of the launch carried on NASA and Roscomos’ websites. In the video, a burst of light was seen around the rocket, which was still visible in the distance.

NASA has paid for places on Russia’s Soyuz rockets for its astronauts to travel to the International Space Station since the American shuttle retired seven years ago.

Recently, the U.S. has been seeking to replace the route with contracts with commercial space companies, such as SpaceX, but the Soyuz currently remains the only way to reach the station.

SpaceX and Boeing are both scheduled to have unmanned test flights with their own spacecraft in January and NASA astronauts are training for flights aboard the two companies' crafts in June and August.
Soyuz MS-10, carrying a cosmonaut and an astronaut to the International Space Station, is forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan after a failure with its Soyuz-FG rocket.