U.S. and Russian Astronauts Safe After Making Emergency Landing When Booster Rocket Failed on Launch

(BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan) — 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 and subjecting the crew to heavy G-loads. NASA said that rescue teams have reached Hague and Ovchinin and they’ve been taken out of the capsule and were in good condition. The capsule landed about 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the city of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan. 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 in recent years. “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 International Space Station six hours after the launch, but the Soyuz b...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime overnight space Source Type: news