BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) — Two astronauts from the U.S. 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.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin lifted off as scheduled at 2:40 p.m. (0840 GMT; 4:40 a.m. EDT) 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.
The launch failure marks an unprecedented mishap for the Russian space program, which has been dogged by a string of launch failures and other incidents.
“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.
They were to dock at the orbiting outpost six hours later, but the booster suffered a failure minutes after the launch.
NASA and Russian Roscosmos space agency said the astronauts were in good condition after their capsule landed about 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the city of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.
Search and rescue teams were heading to the area to recover the crew. Dzhezkazgan is about 450 kilometers (280 miles) northeast of Baikonur. Spacecraft returning from the ISS normally land in that region.
Jesus fuck AP, your level of suck is “unprecendented”, except that it isn’t.
Our astrounaut’s life wouldn’t have been imperiled if only Congress had repealed the Magnitsky Act.
How can a launch failure be unprecedented when the next phrase says the program has been dogged by a string of launch failures? AP inquiring minds want to know.
Nice space station you got there. Pity if no one but us could get to it.
The above would be considered conspiracy-mongering by everyone but the guy who said that a drill hole in the station was “sabotage”.
This is unprecedented because there has never been a launch abort with a capsule separation while astronauts were aboard. They run tests of course, but this was real. The only other time a launch failure happened was with Challenger, and there they couldn’t separate the orbiter safely.
I know the AP articles usually suck, but this one had the facts and statements correct people, so ease up a bit. Launch incidents happen often enough to make you worry, but having it on a manned launch, where they are particularly careful, is a big deal.