Soyuz Take Off Aborted

Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague are likely to go into space in the spring after their flight was suddenly aborted, the head of the Russian space agency said Friday.

Neither the United States nor Russia will be able to send astronauts to the ISS until investigators determine why a Soyuz rocket failed after blast-off Thursday, complicating an already tricky launch calendar for 2019.

A Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned two minutes after liftoff Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station, triggering an automatic abort command that forced the two-member crew - an American and a Russian - to make a harrowing parachute landing in their capsule, 200 miles from the launch site in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague are likely to go into space in the spring after their flight was suddenly aborted, the head of the Russian space agency said Friday.

Neither the United States nor Russia will be able to send astronauts to the ISS until investigators determine why a Soyuz rocket failed after blast-off Thursday, complicating an already tricky launch calendar for 2019.

A Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned two minutes after liftoff Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station, triggering an automatic abort command that forced the two-member crew - an American and a Russian - to make a harrowing parachute landing in their capsule, 200 miles from the launch site in the steppes of Kazakhstan.