Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin (front) and NASA astronaut Nick Hague of the ISS Expedition 57/58 prime crew attend a send-off ceremony ahead of their Soyuz MS-10 space flight scheduled to start, October 11, 2018. (Photo: VCG)
Two astronauts from the US and Russia were safe after an emergency landing Thursday in the steppes of Kazakhstan following the failure of a Russian booster rocket carrying them to the International Space Station (ISS).
US astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin were rescued without injuries in Kazakhstan.
"The emergency rescue system worked. The vessel was able to land in Kazakhstan... The crew are alive," the Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a tweet.
The two astronauts lifted off as scheduled at 0840 GMT Thursday from the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Soyuz booster rocket. Roscosmos and NASA said the three-stage Soyuz booster suffered an emergency shutdown of its second stage.
The capsule jettisoned from the booster and went into a ballistic descent, landing at a sharper than normal angle and subjecting the crew to a greater G-force, but the astronauts have been prepared for this scenario in training, according to the NASA commentator.
The US space agency said that the crew were in good condition and communicating with rescue workers after landing about 20 kilometers east of the Kazakh city of Dzhezkazgan.
"Thank God, the crew is alive," Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters when it became clear that the crew had landed safely. He added that the president is receiving regular updates about the situation.
The astronauts were to dock at the ISS six hours after the launch. It was to be the first space mission for Hague, who joined NASA's astronaut corps in 2013. Ovchinin spent six months on the orbiting outpost in 2016.
Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin, who watched the launch together with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, tweeted that a panel has been set up to investigate the cause of the booster failure.
Earlier this week, Bridenstine emphasized that collaboration with Russia's Roscosmos remains important.
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is currently the only vehicle for ferrying crews to the ISS following the retirement of the US space shuttle fleet. But in the coming years, the arrival of the SpaceX's Dragon V2 and Boeing's Starliner crew capsules will join the competition.
Thursday's failure was the first manned launch failure for the Russian space program since September 1983 when a Soyuz exploded on the launch pad. At that time, Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov jettisoned and landed safely near the launch pad, surviving the heavy G-loads without injuries.
In August, the ISS crew spotted a hole in a Russian Soyuz capsule docked to the orbiting outpost that caused a brief loss of air pressure before being patched. The safety and health of three Americans, two Russians and one German aboard the station were not threatened.